Britain Runs Out of Money for Defence and Order

When a defence secretary resigns, it is usually about him. When John Healey resigned on June 11, it was about the country. In a stinging letter he told Keir Starmer he had been "unable," and the Treasury "unwilling," to fund Britain's armed forces "at this time of rising threats." What pushed him out was the Defence Investment Plan he had finally been shown days earlier: it raised defence spending to just 2.68% of GDP by 2030, which, he said, fell well short of what the moment demanded. He was the sixth minister to quit Starmer's government in a month.

The timing made the resignation more than political theatre. It came days after the head of the armed forces, Sir Richard Knighton, called this the most dangerous period since the Cold War, and in the same week that all five of the Royal Navy's Astute-class attack submarines were sitting in dock — not one at sea — after defects were found on HMS Anson. Britain, in other words, was leading a multinational mission in the Strait of Hormuz and a NATO patrol in the Arctic while unable to put a single hunter-killer submarine to sea. Ed Arnold of the RUSI think-tank put the practical problem plainly: the resignation leaves Starmer scrambling for a replacement and for a way to publish a defence plan its own minister has just disowned.

As the state strained to fund what keeps a country safe from enemies abroad, it was visibly losing its grip on the more basic job of keeping order at home. The murder of teenager Henry Nowak became a political brawl, with Starmer rounding on Nigel Farage and Elon Musk over their handling of it and Farage's "pure, cold rage" speech splitting his own party. Then the disorder spread: online hatred fed violent riots in Belfast; a fourteen-year-old girl was arrested after a teacher and two pupils were stabbed at a Manchester school; and the long inquiry into the Nottingham killings closed with families demanding answers for the failures that let them happen.

Put the two halves together and the week describes a state stretched past its means. The same Treasury that will not find the money for submarines is the one whose courts, police and hospitals keep appearing in the week's other headlines, each a small verdict on institutions worn thin. The economic wash from the Iran war — higher energy, food and mortgage costs — only tightens the squeeze. Starmer is being asked to deter Russia abroad and hold the line at home, and this week he was visibly short of the money and the ministers to do either.

The immediate test is who replaces Healey, and whether the Defence Investment Plan can be rewritten into something a new secretary will actually defend. But the deeper one is whether a government this stretched can convince anyone — Moscow, Washington, or its own voters — that it can still do the two things a state cannot fail at. This week it could not, and said so out loud.