Yesterday, just one week before the critical Makerfield by-election, Keir Starmer was forced to contend with the shock resignation of defence minister John Healey. Hours later, a second resignation hit the prime minister. Al Carns – armed forces minister, and a man only recently spawned by the Westminster NPC engine – also quit.
The official line from the ex-MoD lads is that Healey and Carns are both deeply disappointed with the prime minister over his government’s insufficient allocation of funds for defence. As per his resignation letter, Healey’s main bone of contention is the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), and what he views as its failure to stump up adequate cash.
Right now, defence spending hovers at around 2.4% of GDP. Starmer has publicly committed to increasing it to 3.5% of GDP by 2035. In the words of Danhausen, that’s a lot of human monies. As The Times has it, the Treasury tried to get around this with a bit of creative accounting. Healey was promised a funding package of £13.5bn (by his sums, £4.5bn short of what he needed) – but only £10bn of that was “real cash”. The rest was “Treasury trickery”, which would mean that defence spending would only increase 0.08 percentage points by 2030. Not a lot of human monies.
Both Healey and Carns argued that Starmer’s inaction, and Treasury intransigence, risks the UK’s future national security. “We are asking,” wrote Carns, “our armed forces to operate in a more dangerous world on a budget written for a calmer one”. His resignation was followed by Rachel Hopkins and Pamela Nash, parliamentary aides at the ministry of defence, handing in their notices as well. Dan Jarvis was later announced as Healey’s replacement.
Healey, until yesterday a stalwart ally of Starmer, leaves the prime minister even more politically exposed than he was already. His resignation follows hot on the heels of Wes Streeting’s, and should Burnham win next week’s by-election, the PM will have to fight a leadership contest as early as this autumn. But perhaps Healey and Carns’ double-act is best seen as an attempt to discipline the future Labour leadership, rather than the one that’s – at least for the time being – presently installed in Downing Street.
Under this Labour government, the ministry of defence has been something of a sacred cow. Objectively, the MoD has a bad record when it comes to responsible spending. In 2022, a dossier compiled by Labour identified £13bn of wasted money since 2010, including cash spent on faulty earplugs, out-of-date IT systems and admin errors. Trident, the nuclear deterrent which eats up about 6% of defence spending annually, has been beset by failed missile tests – and that’s before you consider that, being dependent on American support, it’s questionable whether it even constitutes an independent nuclear arsenal. Britain’s new aircraft carriers come in late, over-budget, and are dogged by mechanical problems. Indeed, the MoD has racked up the kind of overspend that HS2 bosses could only dream of. It’s no wonder Rachel Reeves is a little reluctant to simply hand over infinite money.
Labour’s attempts to squeeze the welfare bill and find savings in most Whitehall departments have been unpopular with its membership. There’ll be pressure on the next leader to turn on the money taps, and increase public spending in the areas which matter most to the party’s core voters. Healey and Carns’ resignations send a clear message to whoever Starmer’s replacement turns out to be: fund the armed forces, or there’ll be trouble. Austerity for thee, but not for me.
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