The British government has shown “gross indifference to defence” and put the UK “in crisis”, according to a government adviser who has sharply criticized Keir Starmer’s military policy.
Former NATO Secretary General and author of the government’s Strategic Defense Review, George Robertson, believes Starmer was “unwilling to make the necessary investments”, the Financial Times reported.
Additionally, the former defense secretary will warn during a lecture in Salisbury on Tuesday that an Iran war “would be a stark warning”.
He will say in his speech, “We are underprepared. We are underinsured. We are under attack. We are not safe…Britain’s national security and safety is at risk.”
Lord Robertson, who led NATO from 1999 to 2003, would also accuse “non-military experts at the Treasury” of “vandalism”. “We cannot protect Britain with an ever-increasing welfare budget,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
The government’s blueprint for proposals to fund the Strategic Defense Review, including a 10-year defense investment plan by last autumn, has been repeatedly postponed amid warnings that the military faces a funding gap of £28bn over the next four years.
According to sources, the Defense Ministry, the Treasury and Downing Street have not reached any agreement on how to proceed.
Robertson believes that boosting defense funding may require spending cuts in other departments. In his speech, he will say that Chancellor Rachel Reeves “used only 40 words on defense in just over an hour” in her budget speech last year, while last month “in her spring statement she didn’t use a single word”.
He would add: “There is a corrosive complacency in Britain’s political leadership today. There is lip service about risks, threats, bright red signals of danger – but the promised national conversation about defense cannot even be started.”
In February Luke Pollard, the Minister for Defense Readiness and Industry, told the Guardian that the plan was “a bigger task than many people outside Defence realise”.
This would mean “fundamentally changing the shape of our armed forces, in particular, moving toward greater autonomy”, he said, while also stressing the need to replenish military reserves sent to Ukraine in recent years. “Replacing Tank A with Tank B is not a simple matter.”
Robertson said he would cite the country’s inability to deploy more than one Royal Navy warship to the Mediterranean within the first fortnight of the Iran war to illustrate Britain’s complacency towards defence.
In the speech, he will warn that the country is not only facing a shortage of military kit, but also “crisis in logistics, engineering, cyber, ammunition, training and medical resources”.
Last week, Defense Secretary John Healey made a revelation Secret Russian submarine operations Targeting critical maritime infrastructure around UK waters.
A government spokesperson said: “We are working on a strategic defense review to address the threats we face.
“This is supported by the largest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War, totaling more than £270 billion in this Parliament.”
The spokesperson said the government is finalizing the defense investment plan and will publish it as soon as possible.
