Politicians who say one thing and then do another. That’s the theme of my latest book, and one that runs right through my time as a Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister. When Andy Burnham stood up in the House of Commons last month and claimed national security “can’t come at the expense of social security” after being challenged over defence funding by Kemi Badenoch, he said the quiet bit out loud.
It was a soundbite that, rightly, will be thrown back at him time and again over the coming months and years. We can only hope that, with global threats escalating amid an ongoing grey zone conflict with Russia, it will not end up an epitaph for the entire nation. But then we have grown used to keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for the best in recent years when it comes to Britain’s defence.
While Burnham’s admission sent shockwaves through the political and media establishment and made headlines, it wasn’t a huge surprise to some of us. For years we have watched in deep concern as our military capabilities have been hamstrung whilst the incentives of a life on state welfare have outstripped genuine need and begun to disincentivise actual work.
Today, one in five working-age adults is on Universal Credit. Indeed, in the 2025-26 financial year, the country spent £62billion on defence and £145billion on working-age welfare.
I think it would be a profound mistake for the PM to – as is being reported – delay a decision on funding our armed forces until next autumn, in favour of maintaining the status quo. It is frankly astonishing, and encapsulates my book perfectly, that Chancellor, John Healey, could have brought down the former PM by resigning in principle over defence and then, on arriving at the Treasury, take such a radically different view to the one he quit over.
In his letter of resignation to Keir Starmer on June 11, Mr Healey wrote: “I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.”
His sudden departure was the final nail in the coffin of Sir Keir’s authority. Eleven days later he was forced to resign. Yet having been rewarded with the Chancellorship for his integrity, Mr Healey now holds the very purse strings of the department he locked horns with in his battle to increase defence spending to 3%.
And yet he now seems content to allow his new boss to kick the can down the road. It is not a defendable position for him to now be content to allow his new boss to kick the can down the road.
Mr Healey is a good man. I know him personally. We used to chat regularly in the margins of Defence Questions as I tried to improve his access to the Ministry of Defence when I was in the government ministerial team, and override party jostling to deliver better outcomes for our service personnel. He knows in his heart that his position is not defensible. I cannot truly believe that he will have seen the threats we face as a country first-hand as Defence Secretary, resign over their lack of commensurate funding and then to go to the Treasury and apparently dismiss them. That really would be no way to run a country.
As I saw over my decade in public life, low expectations mean that the public can forgive many things from their political leaders. But I struggle to believe that they will forget a government that in the face of these very clear and increasing threats would so wilfully get the nation’s priorities wrong.
Perhaps Mr Burnham is relying on the age-old truth that, while defence of the realm is often cited as the first duty of any government, it has for decades remained way down the list of priorities for most political parties – including Governments I have been part of. Analysts have been warning for years that the world is becoming a more dangerous and unstable place, with growing threats from the tens of thousands of migrants fleeing failed states, Islamic extremism, a rising China and a more belligerent Russia.
It’s regretful that has not translated into action or – more importantly – genuine strategic investment in most European nations’ Armed Forces and especially in Britain. Yes, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought defence back up the agenda but spending has not matched rhetoric. It’s far cheaper to talk tough. Actually backing your words with cash is altogether harder. Yet interestingly on this point, I think the public is now getting ahead of the debate.
As veteran journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings said in this paper last week: “The Labour Party is lagging behind the country. The British people are waking up to the threat while Labour are off in fairyland.” From my perspective, for the first time in many decades, defence spending, veterans and the whole defence theme is finally in a place on the electoral debating matrix that is starting to cut through.
People are starting to realise that if you get this kind of thing wrong, there’s no point in talking about welfare or the NHS because neither will exist. That’s the reason a credible defence should be the number one function of the state. Without it there is nothing else. This, I think it’s fair to say, is finally landing in the public consciousness.
What are the chances of open war with Russia? My view is irrelevant. Listen to the experts instead. The new chief of MI6 Blaise Metreweli who has said “we are now operating in a space between peace and war” while highlighting the “the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia”. Or the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton who recently admitted: “This is the most dangerous period that I have known.”
Neither of them could remotely be described as shrinking violets. Ditto Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, who has warned of growing threats.
There’s little point having these brilliantly qualified experts running your security services, paying them large sums of money to advise us on threats and then completely ignoring them. Especially when we are only one or two mistakes or misjudgements away from coming out of the grey zone hybrid war, and into an all-out conflict.
We are lucky enough to live in an extraordinarily privileged country that has largely enjoyed the fruits of peace for decades. Many of the actual threats to Britain have been quietly dealt with by our most discrete and bespoke national security assets. Indeed, we retain a military suite of security services that remain in the top tier globally. Our personnel across all the services are highly trained and motivated. I know this first-hand from my own time in uniform and from my time as an MP and minister. We also have some incredible capabilities; not enough you could argue, but we have them.
But there is something in the water about this Government not taking Defence and Defence people seriously. One of the very first things the Government did after winning the 2024 Election was to attempt to repudiate the 2023 Legacy Act, which I campaigned for and brought into being after seeing the plight of our Armed Forces Veterans hounded by inane court processes into their eighties and nineties, particularly after their service in Northern Ireland This politically senseless move has direct strategic impacts on our abilities to raise, recruit and deploy our Forces, and yet is championed by an endless parade of Labour Ministers.
They called it ‘unlawful’; the High Court said it wasn’t. They said it was an amnesty; it never was. They said veterans groups didn’t like it; I’m yet to meet a single veteran of this view. There’s something in the water when it comes to this Government and its attitude towards defence. No-one can quite tell what it is.
The threats we face today are not only conventional. It is right we’re talking about frigates and tanks and missiles and drones, but in lots of ways this part of the debate is old hat. The actual contests of influence are now around the sovereignty of Artificial Intelligence; who controls the compute power that your critical national infrastructure or your intelligence networks are run on. Not only in physical terms but jurisdictional control too. This is the space in which we are now operating. Our enemies are; we must keep pace with them.
I know we’ve got brilliant people working in this space and I remain convinced that we will get it right as a country. But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. We’ve enjoyed the peace for too long and it may now be coming to an end. To not paraphrase the Prime Minister, we can’t have social security without national security. It’s time we all woke up to that hard fact.
Johnny Mercer served three tours of Afghanistan with 29 Commando Regiment before being elected in 2015 as Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View. He served as a junior minister before becoming Cabinet Minister for Veterans until 2024. His new book, No Way To Run A Country (Macmillan, £25) is out now
