Labour Conference: Defence issues facing the UK government
Britain’s centre left needs to face up to the global threats
There are around 300 scheduled fringe meetings in and around Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, which starts tomorrow. Of these, I’ve managed to find six on the topic of Defence. They include one whose laudable aim is atrocity prevention, and another about care for veterans, both of which are vital issues.
But let’s put it this way: national security is not top of the agenda for those paying good money to influence Britain’s new ruling party.
Instead the prime lobbying issues on the fringe are: Net Zero, child poverty, workers’ rights, AI and — bizarre but predictable — crypto.
Many fringe meetings are posed around a question that starts “How…”.
How will Labour achieve its Net Zero targets? How can Labour deliver affordable energy bills? How can Labour rescue Britain’s rivers? How do we reform social security to get people into good jobs?
The obvious answer to all of these questions is: by avoiding catastrophic defeat by Russia in a war that shatters NATO, and by avoiding the disintegration of British civil society under the pressure of fascism, Islamism, Putinism and organised crime.
But it’s very hard to get the politicians or the ecosystem of businesses, lobbyists and NGOs surrounding them, to focus on this problem. National security, and the factors undermining it, are the great unspoken. As for detailed debates — land vs maritime, nuclear vs conventional, the F-35B vs the F-35A… you’ll have to forage hard around the Albert Dock to find them openly addressed.
In this newsletter I am going to set out the five major Defence and Security issues facing the Labour government as it enters its fourth month in office, and the decisions that lie ahead. As always, this is entirely my own take, based only on information in the public domain.
1. Ukraine
The British effort to help Ukraine is significant, costly and improving. The UK has trained thousands Ukrainian soldiers, is spending around £2.5bn a year on arms and material support to Ukraine, and is — reading between the lines — clearly trying to gain Ukraine permission to strike deep Russian targets using the Storm Shadow missile (which, it turns out, can only do precision strike with US supplied data, giving Washington a veto on the idea).
At least two MOD taskforces dedicated to helping Ukraine innovate solutions to counter Russian aggression. TF Hirst is about boosting UK-Ukraine defence industrial partnerships, while TF Kindred co-ordinates the gifting of UK military aid.
But the strategic issue for the UK is this: how much of its budget, intelligence command know-how and diplomatic capital is it prepared to expend not simply on Ukrainian survival but on Ukrainian victory — that is, the expulsion of Russian troops from all Ukrainian territory, combined with crippling sanctions and offensive non-military actions to disrupt and disorientate a country that has declared itself our enemy?
I am pretty certain the government does want to do this, just as the previous government did. I am equally certain that the electorate and the vast majority of MPs have no clue as to the cost and effort this entails.
2. The Strategic Defence Review
On coming to power, the Labour government initiated a Strategic Defence Review. But instead of locating the project inside the Cabinet Office national security directorate, as happened with the Integrated Review and its Refresh in 2021 and 2023, Keir Starmer nominated the MOD to own the process, and the MOD nominated a trio of independent reviewers, led by former NATO general secretary Lord Robertson to carry it out.
The politics of this are significant. The Integrated Review and its Refresh went wrong because, while the latter — belatedly — identified the scale of the Russian threat, it was unable to convince the Sunak government (which took the Refresh over in mid-stream) to devote resources commensurate with the threat.
Hence we have the perennial headlines: most of our attack submarines are in remont, our promised manouver division is weak, the houses our armed forces have to live in are ramshackle and full of mould and — unsurprisingly — recruitment is slow.
For me, what makes sense about giving the SDR to an independent body is that it can make military-strategic recommendations and make the case for a budget to match them. As I have argued here many times, Britain needs rapidly to rearm in order to play a leading role in NATO, and to compensate for the fact that the USA is becoming a China focused and politically unstable ally.
While the SDR process will consider some purely mil-tech issues, some of the big issues facing it are primarily political. For example, if we move to an expanded Reserves system, reviving the Territorial Army as a self-contained second-line force — as I have recommended to the SDR — that will change the face of the army itself.
In the end, the SDR needs to function as the Wanless Report (2002) did for the Blair/Brown government, mandating a clear uplift in the percentage of GDP we spend, and giving the politicians a way to sell the fiscal consequences to the electorate.
3. The Security Pact with Europe
Labour wants a new and comprehensive security pact with the EU. As of this week we know which commissioners we are dealing with — and with many Baltic and Nordic countries getting jobs at the geopolitical sharp end, that bodes well for progress.
But beyond all the secondary issues — migration, border security, INTERPOL — etc there is one over-arching question: can the UK get into, or align with, the European Defence Industrial Strategy? Or will it be frozen out. Getting into EDIS means aligning the current bilateral projects — with France on complex weapons and Germany potentially on land equipment — with the new European strictures which mandate buying European kit and promoting mil-tech sovereignty.
Personally, I would trade away a lot (because EU politics is always brutally transactional) to get the UK into EDIS, up to and including involvement in the EU’s command structures and some signal joint excercises and joint ops with key European powers.
If we can’t do this, then we’re going to have to join up with the exclude-niks — Norway and Turkey — and pursue existing bi/and trilateral deals like GCAP and the Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon, and keep our fingers crossed that the next American president, or the one after that, does not walk away from involvement with NATO. Which brings me to…
4. Sovereign Capability
The UK does not have the means to regenerate even the meagre combat power it can deploy today, if faced with a crisis. Even if Labour stays in government for a decade, and the global economic situation is benign, and Russia does not attack us, it will take much of that time to rebuild an arms industry we can rely on.
The Storm Shadow row, where the USA came to Kyiv and leaned on both the Brits and Zelensky to avoid permission to strike inside Russia, using UK reliance on GPS data for precision strike as leverage, shows that we have, in fact, very little military sovereignty once the USA goes shaky on us.
That’s why, of the two major mid-century commitments — AUKUS and GCAP — the latter remains a vital project. It will give the UK a 6th Generation combat aircraft that the Americans cannot pull the plug on (presuming we can arm it with weapons we can target ourselves).
But GCAP is coming up to a milestone — the workshare agreement between Italy and Japan — and there are differing conceptions of what it is for. Japan wants it as an alternative to buying the F-35, and therefore needs it by 2035. Inside UK Defence circles there’s a tendency to say: what’s the rush? If this is a platform for the mid-century, and may be up against a Chinese rather than a Russian adversary, let’s make it as futuristic as possible.
And that means, potentially, making it even more stealthy, soundless and potentially autonomous — just as China intends for its own 6G aircraft. And thus, if necessary, delivering it a bit later.
And the tug-of-war over the future of GCAP is redolent of the wider problem. 30+ years of neoliberalism and wars of choice have denuded the UK of the industrial capacity to defend itself.
But if the private sector won’t invest in setting that right, the state will have to. And that could mean public money and even public ownership, as with Sheffield Forgemasters. And that’s not something Labour is used to doing.
5. Oh, and… the riots
Labour’s conference meets less than two months after the British far right staged its worst attack on democracy ever. The Notting Hill riots were ugly. Mosley’s marches through Jewish areas in the 1930s appalling. But to my knowledge, the far right in this country has never attempted to burn refugees to death in three cities simultaneously, while being publicly egged-on by celebrity journalists and members of the US Republican Party.
The more we know about the riots, the more systemic the threat the far right seems. Though many of the perpetrators were hapless victims of poverty and exclusion, and others habitual criminals, some were found to have an organised relationship with Britain’s known fascist groups. However, for many their relationship to fascism was disorganised, networked, viral — and for that reason easily accelerated by disinformation into attempts at mass murder.
Because the far-right influencers who sparked the riots have an overt project of becoming the footsoldiers of Reform, and because Reform stands second place in 89 seats Labour won in July, you can bet that its shadow will loom large over the Liverpool conference.
But in addition to being a public order issue, and a social cohesion issue, what happened in early August is also a national security issue. Because it opens up British society to targeting by every bad actor trying to paralyse our country as a geopolitical actor.
In case it’s not obvious, one of these — Iran — has direct proxies operating across British society. Another, Russia, has its fingers both in the UK far left and the far right (the Russia-versteher daily The Morning Star even has a fringe meeting inside Labour’s conference venue this year).
Russia and its allies have one aim with regard to the UK: so fracture our civil society so badly that parts of the population actively oppose the defence of this country in an Article V type crisis, or intervention to keep open vital shipping lanes in the face of terrorism. That’s why their proxies chant for the Houthis to “make us proud” in the Red Sea, and why the left’s Putin fanboys call UK military aid to Ukraine “escalation”.
And for me, that’s close to the #1 threat UK national security actually faces right now.
Getting organised
Very few Labour politicians come into public life to deal with stuff like this. They come, quite rightly, because they want to see a greener, more socially just future, with better pay and conditions for workers, compassion for refugees, a generous welfare system and respect for nature. That’s why the NGO ecosystem around Labour is skewed heavily towards these issues.
But what we need, if we’re going to govern for a decade or more, and inaugurate a progressive century in the UK, and squash the hate-spreaders and disinformation merchants is a social-democratic cadre that fights actively to prioritise defence, and develops expertise to engage with the detailed and often tough issues that it throws up.
Labour’s five missions — high growth, net zero, safe streets, comprehensive free healthcare and a first class education for every child — would be just in all circumstances.
They are vital in a world where there is a totalitarian aggressor, forcing us to rearm and reindustrialise, and where our own society is so fragmented that there are doubts over whether we would actually fight if attacked.
Those of us who want to frame Labour missions around the vital task of rearmament, reindustrialisation and enhanced social cohesion need to get organised and start setting the agenda.
This is not a left-v-right issue inside the party: in an era of fascist aggression, just as in the 1930s, it’s an issue for the Bevanites and much as the Bevinites (indeed, for the nerdy, the Wintringhamites too). Buttonhole me in the corridors of Liverpool this week if you agree — and let’s do something.
This was also published on my Conflict & Democracy newsletter.
