If Keir Starmer insists on more defence spending, will Labour declare war on itself?

There is something odd about Keir Starmer’s grand declaration that “this is a once-in-a-generation moment for our national security”, when he refuses to set a date for increasing defence spending.

“Europe must step up further to meet the demands of its own security,” the prime minister said yesterday, as European leaders met in Paris. “We have talked about it for too long.”

But we are going to talk about it a bit longer, because although British public opinion supports spending more on defence in principle, it shrinks from doing so in practice. And politics is much the same across Europe – a constraint felt most sharply by Olaf Scholz in Germany, where there is an election on Sunday.

According to YouGov, 58 per cent of British people support the UK sending peace-keeping troops to Ukraine if there is a deal; and 60 per cent support raising defence spending to 3 per cent of national income. But that falls to 30 per cent if it means “less money to spend on public services”.

As for “tax increases on people like you” to pay for higher defence spending, they are also supported by only 30 per cent.

That tension is reflected in government. Starmer is keen to set a date for achieving the promise of increasing defence spending from 2.3 per cent of national income to 2.5 per cent. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is keen to avoid doing so.

This is politics through the ages. Prime ministers want to make big gestures on the international stage to impress fellow world leaders, and chancellors have to try to keep the fiscal show on the road – which is particularly difficult for Reeves right now, with the Office for Budget Responsibility’s first drafts of its March forecast already looking as if they will force her to cut spending or raise taxes.

So where would the money come from, if Starmer were to insist that engaging with “the threat we face from Russia” should actually mean something?

He is not short of advice from Conservatives. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the GB News presenter, said: “I don’t want to be one of those people who calls for more money for defence but won’t say how to fund it, because that’s basically a dishonesty on the British public.”

Good for him. But his answer is: cut foreign aid; cut the civil service by one-fifth; cut welfare benefits; and end green subsidies. It all sounds so easy that you wonder why the Conservative government didn’t do it when he was a member of it.

William Hague, the Tories’ former leader, offers a less glib version in his Times column this morning: “It would require reforms of sickness benefits and NHS productivity to succeed, and the runaway train of pension spending – the triple lock – would need brakes.”

Labour and Liberal Democrat voices are less forthcoming about where the money might come from. Despite Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, offering surprisingly emphatic support for “the deployment of British troops in Ukraine to uphold any peace deal and deter Putin”, he and the Labour back benches have diverted themselves by demanding that the question of deploying troops in Ukraine be put to a vote in the House of Commons. The Lib Dems have even demanded the recall of parliament this week for that purpose – but not for the purpose of debating how such a deployment would be paid for.

Rees-Mogg and Hague are at least honest enough to say what they would cut – although Hague’s implication, that NHS spending should be cut to pay for standing up to Vladimir Putin, is not one I can imagine any practising politician being explicit about.

Keir Starmer has not said where the cuts would fall – or which taxes would rise. Because there are no easy choices. Taking defence spending up to 2.5 per cent would mean finding “just” £5bn a year – an amount that could be raised by reversing last year’s national insurance cut for employees. Which MP is going to vote for that? How many Labour MPs would vote to cut foreign aid, or to end the triple-lock guarantee that the state pension will continue to rise faster than prices?

And Starmer is too diplomatic to point out that Spain, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Turkey and Germany are all Nato countries that spend less on defence, in relation to the size of their economies, than Britain already does.

Until the prime minister says how it will be paid for, his fine words about Europe stepping up to “meet the demands of its own security” mean very little.