Boosted defence spending will come at cost of manifesto pledges

Good morning. I’m not going to write about the government’s mooted plans to reduce welfare spending today, because I opined on that last week and I anticipate I will do so again once the details are completely out in the open.

I’m not going to write about the government’s cuts to further education spending, because I anticipate I will want to write about that in the context of their plans for welfare.

And I’m not going to write about the Treasury eyeing cuts to the government’s flagship GB Energy, because, to be blunt, I don’t know enough about energy policy for that to be anything like a good idea.

Instead, today I am going to write about what links all three of these things.

Something has to give

Robert Shrimsley’s column last week helped me identify where the sense of déjà vu I’ve been feeling recently has come from: that strange moment in early March 2020, when it was obvious Boris Johnson’s still relatively new government was going to have its agenda completely blown off course by the challenges of managing Covid-19.

There are some important differences. As Robert writes, one is that Keir Starmer and his team do see the scale of what they are facing. But politics as a whole “still lingers in that half world of both knowing and not knowing”. The most important decision, I think, of Starmer’s premiership was to declare last month that he was willing to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine. Everything else is going to flow from that.

That’s not an aim that can be met by increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP and having a vague plan to get to 3 per cent at some point in the future. (Yes, output targets are stupid in a lot of ways. But as a rule of thumb, we aren’t going to get close to something adequate if we are not spending as much as we did during the cold war.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be episode 4,232 of “Stephen says Labour’s tax pledges will have to go”. Because, in my view, the government’s tax pledges alone are not the only thing that are going to have to flex.

Labour’s commitments on defence spending mean that, whether from the state or households, consumption will have to be redirected from elsewhere. Given that, can fixing the UK’s crisis-stricken social care system really remain a second- or third-order priority? Or is it such a big sink of government spending, household income, time and energy that it needs to shoot up the list?

If the plan really is to find the required defence spending within the government’s fiscal rules via day-to-day spending, is the unscientific “everything not in a ringfenced department will have to be up for grabs” approach going to work without sabotaging manifesto pledges? And if some promises are not going to be met as a result of the UK’s new reality, shouldn’t the government decide which ones it wants to throw overboard and level with the public about that sooner rather than later, rather than have a “path of least resistance” approach to which of its manifesto pledges end up being quietly dropped?

Now try this

I went to see Punch at the Young Vic (a Christmas gift from my partner) on Friday and I found it every bit as powerful as Sarah Hemming did when she saw its premiere at the Nottingham Playhouse. I can’t recommend it highly enough. There are still a few tickets left so try and grab one if you can.

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