'Corrosive complacency' - Lord Robertson tears into Starmer and Reeves in extraordinary intervention on defence spending

A decision by Lord George Robertson to call out the prime minister and his chancellor over their failure to rearm the UK at speed in the face of growing threats marks the most significant intervention on defence spending since the end of the Cold War.

The key question now is whether it will have any effect on political debate and the wider public mood - or whether his bellowing cry for action will be wafted away by reassuring soundbites from Sir Keir Starmer and his team that they have defence and security covered.

The former Labour defence secretary, former NATO chief and, most pertinently, lead author of the government's own defence review, said he was speaking out against his own party with a "heavy heart" and knowing full-well it would not go down well inside Downing Street.

Yet Lord Robertson clearly felt that he had no choice but to put country before politics.

He has waited patiently for almost a year for the government to turn his strategic defence review into a fully-funded plan that was rapidly getting the country - as the prime minister has said needs to happen - ready for war.

Instead of a flood of activity, though, with defence factories churning out weapons and the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force expanding their warfighting prowess, there has been paralysis as Sir Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and John Healey, the defence secretary, attempt to finalise a plan on how to pay for everything.

The Defence Investment Plan should have been published last autumn.

It is still on the prime minister's desk awaiting sign off.

"There is a corrosive complacency today in Britain's political leadership," Lord Robertson said in a carefully crafted speech at the Guildhall in Salisbury to an audience of largely local residents and a sprinkling of journalists, including me.

"Lip service is paid to the risks, the threats, the bright red signals of danger. But even a promised national conversation about defence can't be started."

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Sir Keir has pledged to boost investment on defence to 3.5% of GDP from just over 2% now - but not until 2035 even though he has cited a NATO assessment that Russia could be ready to attack the alliance within three years.

Such a short timeline "should scare us all", Lord Robertson said.

It is why regrowing the armed forces must happen faster - which will cost a lot more money to be made available sooner and require difficult choices to shift cash away from welfare and into warfare.

All this, Lord Robertson said, demanded a much franker discussion with the public than is happening.

"Building deterrence will not be quick or cheap. The public need to face that uncomfortable fact or suffer the consequences of not being safe in a very turbulent world."

He supported a significant switch in how the government priorities expenditure.

"Britain's welfare budget is now five times the amount we spend on defence," Lord Robertson said. "Are we certain that this is the right priority, jeopardising people's future safety and security whilst maintaining an increasingly unsustainable welfare bill?"

Chancellor 'not interested in defence'

More fundamentally, though, Lord Robertson counselled a complete shift in the national mindset away from the "lethargic" thinking of the post-Cold War era and back to a wartime mentality.

"We can't do business as usual," he said.

"Our adversaries don't think that way and we can't afford to. Public attention is focused on planes, tanks and ships we are short of - but they are the important baubles on the Christmas tree. We also need to focus on the tree itself.

"We are simply not ready and we need to rebuild war readiness to deter any possible adversary."

He took aim at the prime minister for talking up the importance of strong defences in an increasingly dangerous world, including in a speech at a security conference in Munich in February and in the wake of the Iran war, but without saying how he would pay for it.

The former defence secretary also targeted Ms Reeves for seemingly not even being that interested in the subject.

"In the chancellor's budget speech last year she used a mere 40 words on defence in over an hour," he said. "In her spring statement she used none."

Given the gravity of the hour, he urged all political parties to work together on increasing defence investment, saying: "How we defend Britain and make its people safe has to be a national endeavour. There is an urgency about the threats which renders political point scoring a dangerous luxury."

Lord Robertson finished by focusing again on the fact that the prime minister had called 18 months ago for a national conversation about defence.

"It is about time to get started," the Labour peer said.

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