by Colonel A Sealy - Farquhar, 17 February 2025
Rachel Reeves will have to bump up taxes by an extra £12bn if she wants to boost defence spending to 2.5pc of GDP in line with Keir Starmer's pledge to NATO and at the same time avoid a fresh round of austerity.
Economists have warned that Sir Keir Starmer’s ambition to bolster the defence budget implied the Chancellor would have to raise taxes or cut spending by £6bn a year alone if she wanted to hit the target by the end of the decade. Unfortunately Starmer and other European idiot heads oif government want that now because they fancy their chances of holding the line against Russia in Ukraine if President Trump cuts off the supply of arms and money to Kiev. Starmer has also allied himself with European warmongers who claim, without anything to substantiate their paranoid ravings, that if Ukraine falls Putin plans to advance right through Europe to the Atlantic coast. They back this up by suggesting The Kremlin is already conducting a campaign of intimidation, blackmail, and political leverage against European nations.
Ensuring that no Whitehall department faces real-terms cuts to its budget for day-to-day spending during this parliament would mean that £12bn of tax rises will be needed, according to the Resolution Foundation.
While Labour has not set out a timetable for raising defence spending to 2.5pc of the economy, military chiefs tasked with carrying out a Stratefic Defence Review, with a view tio reparing the UK to face Russia in armed conflict shortly after the Labour government took office have been piling pressure on the Prime Minister to go further and faster amid demands from Donald Trump to lift spending to as much as 5pc of GDP.
This means Chancellor Reeves faces the prospect of being forced to break her promise not to “come back with more borrowing or more taxes” less than six months after her record tax raid. Alternatively, she risks angering public sector unions by imposing deep spending cuts to unprotected Whitehall departments such as transport and housing.
While the Chancellor has suggested funding for Starmer's delusional posturing will come from cuts to spending and welfare, the Treasury has left the door open for more tax rises in March against a backdrop of low growth and higher borrowing costs.
Military spending demands and the pressure to protect certain government department’s budgets mean unprotected departments face finding total cuts of up to £12bn, or the equivalent of 6pc in real terms over this parliament.
Clearly, defence spending can be a technological driver of growth and the Military Industrial Complex a generally stable provider of employment and therefore taxable income. But UK’s relative economic position vis-à-vis the US and western Europe (and why not eastern Europe and the east?) is very much more dependent on service industries, which are best served by (a) a government which supports innovation and entrepreneurship, (b) a government promoting good relationships with all countries in the world and (c) inexpensive and stable energy supply. All of these things are under attack by the Labour governments foreign, business and energy policies.
The EU is a restrictive market so it was a good idea to leave it. As a small example, I recently learned that Japan imports its strawberries from Serbia, one of the few European – strawberry producing – countries not in the EU. Japan is a big market!
There is no Soviet bloc anymore and the Cuban missile crisis should remind you how understandable it is that a country will not accept another country placing missiles aimed at its main cities directly on its border. This was the main reason for Russia's first militarily approaching Kiev to convince the Ukrainian government that Moscow was serious about not having NATO missiles on its border and, when that was unsuccessful (because Russia naively believed France and Germany would convince Ukraine to step back), Russia was forced to invade.
We should not forget the US and NATO build up of weapons and military training in Ukraine since 2014 (and probably before), the push by the Obama and Biden administrations to fast track Ukraine into NATO nor the CIA training of Ukrainian insurgents at a dozen secret sites on the border to Russia (as reported by the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html).
Some pundits have said we must never allow ourselves to be put in a position where we have choose between aligning ourselves with the United States or Europe when, firstly, there is no reason for the two to be exclusive and, secondly, USA has just distanced itself from Europe (including UK) in telling us that Ukraine is forthwith our problem. That sounds rather like the US playing its standard role of school playground bully: you either do business with us or we sanction/tax/tariff you! But the world is tired of such behaviour which is one reason why BRICS is so successful.
My point is that UK should keep itself well away from all conflicts and, instead, encourage peace and wealth through business while having a healthy and strong defence force, but it should only be used for defence and not for aggression.
And the only intimidation, blackmail, and political leverage we are suffering from is from our own politicians.
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