As Liberal Democrats our first task is to keep our society as fair, free and open as we can.
This society is threatened by a more aggressive Russia and a less reliable USA. This threat has to be right at the top of our thinking. The external environment has changed a lot and will require us to spend more on defence.
Determining how much more should be based on what it will cost to meet the threats we face. It shouldn’t be based on what Rachel Reeves thinks we can afford in order to balance the books, or on what we spend now plus a little bit, or on what Donald Trump tells us. We need to defend the country, rather than make a spreadsheet add up.
The currency for the debate has been defence spend as a % of GDP. This isn’t a good way of working out what we need, but is a helpful shorthand for the debate. In 2024 this was 2.3%, and our spring conference motion on The UK’s Response to Trump urges the government to set a timetable to get this to 2.5% – a task the government is already committed to. Kemi Badenoch said this week that she would love to be able to get to 3% but that the party couldn’t ‘make the numbers work’ – the spreadsheet again. Reform set a target of 3% within 6 years in their 2024 election manifesto.
None of this sounds enough. There is ample evidence that the current defence budget is not sufficient even to support yesterday’s needs. The threat has increased and the support from across the Atlantic is decreasing. When we last faced an aggressive Russia in the 70’s and 80’s, we were spending just over 4% of GDP on defence. And that was with a supportive USA. It is hard to see why the requirement would be less than this now.
This is a substantial increase – around £45bn a year. But it is likely to be the price of freedom. After allowing for inflation, GDP per head today is roughly twice what it was in 1980, and we were able to afford this level of spend then. There is pressure on public finances but we cannot let this stop us having the right conversation and making the right choices.
Supply chain and other constraints stop an immediate increase to this level of spend. But lead times are long and we need to commit to a plan quickly (and pray for breathing space in the meantime).
Somebody needs to call this out. The government has hemmed itself in to a narrative that is all about balancing the books. The Tories aren’t stepping up to the plate; they are still a shower. And Reform is in hock to Trump and inconsistent on Putin.
If we want a free and independent UK in a free and independent Europe, then as Liberal Democrats we have to be clear how big the need is here.
To this end we should amend the conference motion on Trump (F14 – agenda here) to make clear that the requirement for defence spending is significantly above the 2.5% of GDP that the motion targets as drafted.
* Kevin has been a party member since June 2017, from Kingston
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33 Comments
Mr Langford really must specify which areas of current expenditure he would cut to meet his target. We can then have an informed discussion on whether this meets Liberal principles.
“The government has hemmed itself in to a narrative that is all about balancing the books”
I agree defence spending needs to be increased substantially and quickly, but the books still have to be balanced.
We seem to have perpetual austerity. People are struggling under the weight of a cost of living crisis. Soaring rents , huge rises in water bills and council tax, energy costs, together with out public services under immense pressure. A price worth paying , leads to those that can least afford it shouldering virtually all the burden. Ultimately will the EU have the stomach to deploy in such an arena of conflict without US Air & logistical support or any security guarantee – given the Russians declaring that such a deployment would be unacceptable. All the recent jingoistic tub thumping tend to forget when this originally started…A Cnn report, long forgotten in people’s minds – done now wouldn’t suit the Wests narrative
https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1892410776905797983
I agree with Tristan that the books still need to be balanced. We don’t live in a World of infinite resources where we can just have anything the Government wants without thinking about how it can be provided.
I also think we need to substantially enhance our defence capabilities against the Russian threat, as well as provide much more support for Ukraine, but I think this article makes the mistake of going for a headline figure for amount of money, where what we should be doing is figuring out what capabilities we need, THEN asking how we can provide them and how much they will cost.
Imagine you had a builder round and you said to him/her, Here’s £20K. Go do something nice to my house with it. You probably wouldn’t get very good results, or a very efficient spending of the money! But that’s basically the same logic as, We should spend 4% of GDP on defence. I’m sure we do need to spend a lot more on defence, but can we figure out exactly what things we need before start throwing arbitrary figures around?
I notice that the ‘Big Issue’ edition of 18 February carried an interview with the Lib Dem MP for Tunbridge Wells, Mike Martin, who stated that the UK would be at war “before the next General Election” and was advocating the introduction of conscription.
Is this something that Mr Langford would include in his 4% ?
Are the “books” of H M G the same as our everyday non-governmental “books”?
Might we have a defining definition of “balancing the government’s books”?
P S How reliable is our army to defend us from real enemies when it cannot/will not be relied on to protect its own female soldiers?
@ Simon R,
“I agree with Tristan that the books still need to be balanced”
We all know what this means from our own perspective, but what does this mean from the Govt’s perspective?
We are currency users whereas a Govt is a currency issuer. If the Govt isn’t in debt it means it hasn’t issued anything.
It seems like we need to spend a lot more money on everything. If someone is going to propose that we should spend more money – which is normally a good idea – then they should also propose how to raise that money and why your policy should get priority over our other spending commitments.
“All the recent jingoistic tub thumping tend to forget when this originally started…A Cnn report, long forgotten in people’s minds – done now wouldn’t suit the Wests narrative”
For what it’s worth here’s Wikipedia’s take – which puts the blame on the Russians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas#:~:text=By%20August%202014%2C%20Ukraine%20had,the%20territory%20they%20had%20lost.
“Mr Langford really must specify which areas of current expenditure he would cut to meet his target”
Indeed. As always in a guns vrs butter debate it will have to be heath and schools and universities and research and arts/sport and all the rest. Plus the hardy perennials of “waste” and “tax evasion”. And there will have to be more tax. These will be the costs of maintaining a liberal and democratic (and I hope environmentally conscious) Europe.
Or we could sit tight on our island and hope continental Europe does it all for us.
The Cnn report was from Donesk in 2014 in regards to the virtual daily shelling around Donbas by the Ukrainian army. Those are the facts , as uncomfortable as it is for some, the Ukrainian army did indeed use long range artillery targeting Donbas leading to many civilian casualties. This conflict has been going on since 2014. British taxpayers are being asked to stump up for more defense spending, on the behest of a conflict that originated as a dispute in Eastern Ukraine. In all honesty many in that area look to Moscow rather than Kyiv..
And many would rather not have their heavy industries sacrificed on the alter of EU neoliberlism…
The facts around the fighting in the Donbas in 2014 are pretty well known. After the Russian Invasion of Crimea, the Ukrainian government in Kyiv was in disarray. The first forces sent to the Donbas were the paramilitary groups like the Azov regiment. Russian backed separists had occupied administrative centres in Donestk and Luhansk and unilterally declared independence. In July 2017, these Russian backed separist forces shot down a Malayasian Airlines passenger jet with a a Russian-made surface-to-air missile killing all 298 people on board. When the Ukrainian armed forces arrived in the Donbas they pushed back the separist groups. The uprising was almost over that summer, when in August Russian forces were covertly sent into the Donbass with heavy weapons to support the separist groups.
Had Russia not intervened, the Ukranians would have been able to resolve this internal conflict among themselves with autonomous local governing institutions in the Donbas, but remaining part of federal Ukraine.
The escalation of hostilities in 2022 is an expansion of the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas that started 2014.
Ed Davey has called for raising defence spending to 3% and increasing the digital services tax from 2% to 10% Ed Davey backs rapid boost to defence spending after Trump “betrayal” of Ukraine
“Donald Trump’s stitch-up with Putin amounts to a betrayal of Ukraine, the UK and all our allies. It is clear: we are living in a new and dangerous world. We must respond. To ensure that Great Britain is protected against Russia and able to provide the leadership which our continent needs in the absence of the US, we must increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP as soon as possible. But given the severity of the threats we now face, we should not stop there. Politicians should get around the table and create a consensus on how to go further. We simply cannot afford not to do this. Our national security is at stake. The question is not whether we take this step now: it is what happens if we do not. The UK needs to make a clear stand for allies in Ukraine and across Eastern Europe, for democracy and for our security – against an emboldened Vladimir Putin.”
David Raw: the Big Issue article is here & a bit more nuanced https://www.bigissue.com/news/politics/uk-war-mike-martin-interview-defence-spending-conscription/
“More than 50%” chance of war. And conscription if it’s a big conflict – which is not exactly controversial
Before we start building bigger and better bombs to more easily kill innocent men, women and children, might we first try effective sanctions designed to destroy the Russian economy? And please don’t tell me we’ve already tried that, because we haven’t. What happens to those who break sanctions? Nothing. A slap on the wrist and told not to be naughty boys. Instead of cutting off Russia from the world economy, arresting arms dealers and putting people who sell or buy from Russia in gaol, we turn a blind eye to sanctions busters and let Putin off the hook. Instead of the EU kicking Hungary out of the EU for its continued dealings with Russia and shutting down democracy, nothing is done. No-one is a democratic country should be buying oil or gas from Russia and we should be speaking up against those, like India, that do.
We now know that for at least the next four years the USA will be as much use as a chocolate fireguard in defending Europe, yet this is the USA Starmer wants to do trade deals with instead of with out near neighbours.
Beware the war mongers. The only people who benefit from war are arms manufacturers.
@ Dominic. I’m afraid that anyone with a knowledge of the history of the Liberal Party would realise that conscription is indeed controversial however nuanced that discussion might be.
Some defence data:
100,000 UK Army personnel when Putin became Russian President in 2000
95,000 UK Army when Putin annexed Crimea
75,000 UK Army in 2025
(From current Private Eye)
Yet another success for “our” policy and practices of Neoliberalism?
Thank you everyone for your comments
Yes we need to work out how we would afford this, and that involves choices which are not ag all easy
But with an issue as important as this, working out how much we can afford and setting the spend on this basis is rather putting the cart before the horse – which seems to be what the current government (and, until this morning, our own party) seems to have been doing.
“might we first try effective sanctions designed to destroy the Russian economy? ”
Unfortunately that stable door is wide open now Trump is snuggling up to Putin. But we could still freeze Russian assets which would raise some money.
@ Dominic. As far as conscription is concerned, it was opposed most strongly by Helen Morgan MP on the BBC News website as recently as last May.
@Mick: You seem to be saying that we could make a difference to Russia’s economy by enforcing sanctions better, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I mean, if the EU kicked Hungary out of the EU for sanctions-busting, do you seriously think Orban would care? Does the EU even have any procedures for doing that? And how on Earth are you going to stop India buying Russian oil? Or North Korea supplying troops to Russia or Iran supplying weapons to Russia? I sympathise with your evident distaste for military stuff, but sanctions is just not a workable alternative to making sure we, and Europe, and Ukraine, can and will defend ourselves.
Mike Martin in his interview with the Big Issue has commented . “Obviously if we got into a big war, we’d have conscription straight away,” The objective of UK policy is not to get into a war (big or small). Achieving that requires effective deterrence based on the old Roman dictum “If you want peace, prepare for war”.
Sanctions after the fact are not a deterrent. They are aimed at changing the priorities of a miscreant and/or diminishing the econmic capacity to wage war.
The Soviet union went through 70 years of exteme economic deprivation before the population finally had enough of failed policies. How long this current generation of Russians will stand for it no one knows. Many seem to take pride in their national capacity for resilience in the face of adversity.
Ideally, we will see a return to some semblance of normality after Putin and Trump have faded into history as an aberration that had to be suffered, but that is by no means certain and may be many years off.
@Mick Taylor – “Before we start building bigger and better bombs to more easily kill innocent men, women and children”
Agree, the lesson from Ukraine is surely, we need to firstly restock with the basics, given the rate of battlefield usage. This in itself would contribute to the local economy and start preparation, as I would agree with others, the next few years are going to be the most risky, with respect to peace in Europe; the continent including Scandinavia not just the EU, with both Trump and Putin having eyes on European territory and natural resources.
A question with respect to Mick’s point, is whether the US would permit the UK to fire its Trident missiles…
Re conscription, the Big Issue headline writers are misrepresenting the piece. It may be controversial to David Raw that we had conscription during WW1 & WW2, but those were the kinds of “major conflicts” referred to the piece – and the comment was in the context of explaining that warfare can’t be practiced entirely through drones. I don’t think those comments are particularly remarkable.
Yes, Dominic there was indeed conscription in WW1, but it came two years after the declaration of war and it split the Asquith Liberal Government. It was one of the major factor in the long demise of the Liberal Party.
After WW11 the Liberal Party consistently opposed National Service through to the 1960’s when it was abolished. I didn’t hear any Lib Dem alls for conscription during the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I notice Sir Edward Davey avoided mention of it in his interview today.
Might this article help?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/02/22/how-to-pay-for-defence/
Same old, same old prevarication. Climate disaster looms, put off meaningfull action until tomorrow. War comes closer, put off rearming until tomorrow. If one doesn’t get us …..
Surely it’s pointless arguing about percentages on defence spending? If spending remains roughly the same in monetary terms then as a percentage of GDP the figure will go up and down depending on whether or not GDP is expanding or shrinking? I would also still make the point that there is no agreed list between NATO countries as to what counts as defence spending. We put service pension expenditure in while other countries do not.
A welcome article thanks Kevin. We do need to think about how it is all going to be funded to be sure, but if we continue along this same trajectory withe US seemingly going cold on NATO, and inviting Russia to ‘test’ NATO by invasion of a member state, we may well be at war within the coming five years. Then any spreadsheet management will be out of the window as we’ll be borrowing huge amounts in the service of our own survival. Agreed with comments above that the 4% figure is itself arbitrary and we should start being much more ambitious about what defence capacity Britain and her allies will need in the coming decades, thus funding an explicit plan that the public can be assured is not just money into a black hole (which just basing on GDP figures per se might convey),
A brave article that is well overdue.
“The only people who benefit from war are arms manufacturers.”
A simplistic and unhelpful take on a complex reality.
Arms can help defend freedom as well as take it. It depends whose hands these are in.
So we should do all we can to make sure that Western Democracies have the best means of defence in their hands and not in the hands of Russia or China.
Faced with an unprecedented crisis within NATO, we could be obliged to spend whatever it takes to defend ourselves. Until the situation is clearer we should support Ed Davey’s clear call for an
increase in defence spending to 3% GDP. My personal view though is we, and indeed all NATO countries currently spending less than the US’ 3.45%
should match it.
It is history and perhaps irrelevant now but 7 years ago a friend who was a College lecturer told me that he had friends, ex colleagues who lived in Donetz. He was in frequent telephone conversation with them. They were not pro Russian but when asked why people locally were fighting the Ukranian government forces said, ” Well they are bombing and shelling US all the time”.