UK’s dual motive for higher defence spending raises problems

Good morning. One thing almost everyone in Westminster agrees on is that as a consequence of Donald Trump’s election victory — read our newsletter White House Watch for more on that — UK defence spending will have to rise.

But one unexamined trade-off is that there are two different reasons why that might be: and they would point the government in two very different directions.

Spend to befriend

There are two reasons why the UK might want to increase defence spending in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. First, the election of a more unreliable US president means the UK will need to take a greater role in defending its own interests both overseas but more importantly in its immediate neighbourhood. You hear this primarily from Labour MPs, Liberal Democrat MPs, and some Conservative MPs.

The second reason is that spending more on defence is a good way to ingratiate yourself with Trump, an argument you largely hear from Conservative MPs and some Labour ministers. It’s a point Martin Wolf makes in an excellent column on the UK’s Trump dilemmas, and one that Sam Lowe makes in his Alphaville piece on how to avoid getting caught in Trump’s trade war (emphasis mine):

My working assumption is that the EU, UK, Japan, etc will face three categories of request: 

—‘Buy more American stuff’ (or export less of your own stuff);

— ‘Support me in my global endeavours’ (see: trade restrictions on China); and

— ‘Miscellaneous, other’. 

One way to “buy more American stuff” is to purchase things that you want to buy anyway, like, say, defence equipment. Now, it’s fair to say that many people in Westminster have been cheered by the fact that Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, is an Atlanticist, with several noting a 2013 speech he gave at Chatham House, which you can watch and read in full here. However, it may be worth giving more weight to Rubio’s decision to vote against more aid to Ukraine this year, and that he is the China hawk’s China hawk. The British government has fewer tariffs on Chinese goods than its peers, a legacy of Rishi Sunak’s desire for a warmer relationship with China — a desire that is shared by the new Labour government.

But one approach to Trump management might be, as Sam suggests, to take a look at the defence budget, consider where you might want to buy American kit, wrap that up in a bow and present it as a concession.

There’s a UK specific problem though, which is that the Ministry of Defence has long had a bad reputation on Whitehall for procurement and spending money well, a reputation that the troubled Ajax armoured vehicle programme shows to have been well-earned. The independent report into the Ajax programme, published last year, identified a number of cultural and institutional shortcomings at the MoD, while the public accounts committee has described its procurement as “broken”. The contract signed in 2014 was meant to deliver a family of advanced armoured vehicles to the army starting three years later, but these were beset by noise and vibration issues that caused hearing damage to some crews.

If you want to increase British defence spending to actually make the UK more secure, you need to fix these problems first. But improving the UK’s procurement processes and project delivery might ultimately mean that the UK buys fewer American goods, particularly if the aim of increasing our defence spending is to increase the UK’s autonomy rather than to manage Trump’s mood. Essentially everyone at Westminster believes that increasing defence spending is important — but one of the first things the government must do is clarify what it is really aiming for by doing that.

Yesterday we asked you if you supported the assisted dying bill, as it stands: 45 per cent of poll respondents said yes, 41 per cent said no and 14 per cent were on the fence. Thanks for voting.

Now try this

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the Booker Prize, which is a good push for me to go out and buy it. I have a deep-seated prejudice against novels that claim not to be science fiction — it would be like if someone tried to pretend that Wolf Hall was not historical fiction. Doris Lessing never pretended that she wasn’t writing science fiction! This is silly of me, as two of my favourite authors — Margaret Atwood and Emily St John Mandel — are in denial as well. Here’s the FT review of Orbital, and of St John Mandel’s latest, Sea of Tranquility, which I liked rather more than our reviewer did.

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