Britain's £300B Defence Plan Not Enough for Washington

Keir Starmer spent his last major set-piece as prime minister trying to prove Britain is serious about defence, and Washington told him, in public, that it still isn't serious enough. At the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8, Starmer arrived carrying a nearly £300 billion, four-year Defence Investment Plan — £15 billion of new money layered onto existing budgets — meant to signal that the trajectory toward NATO's 3.5-percent-of-GDP target by 2035 is real. Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to NATO, was not impressed: he told allies who are "lagging behind" to step up, and both sides in Ankara knew he meant Britain most of all. The math explains why. Starmer's plan lifts UK defence spending from 2.6 percent of GDP in 2027 to just 2.7 percent by 2030 — a fraction of the distance to 3.5 percent, let alone the 5 percent, blending in security-related investment, that NATO members nominally accepted last year. Lord George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary who wrote the government's own Strategic Defence Review, had already accused Treasury officials of "vandalism" for slow-walking the money and warned of "corrosive complacency" toward a security picture he says is genuinely deteriorating.

The single biggest line in the package is nuclear: more than £63 billion over four years for the Dreadnought-class submarines, the new SSN-AUKUS attack boats, and a sovereign warhead — codenamed Astraea, designated A21/Mk7 — to replace the aging Holbrook design carried on Trident missiles. The government also confirmed it will buy a dozen F-35A jets and rejoin NATO's nuclear-sharing mission, which in practice means American B61-12 bombs based on British soil for the first time in decades. That makes Britain the world's third-largest nuclear spender, part of a nuclear rearmament wave running well beyond Europe. None of it, in Whitaker's telling, buys Starmer much credit in Ankara.

The drone money tells a similar story of urgency arriving late. The Ministry of Defence used the same week to announce a new Unmanned Systems Task Force, backed by £5 billion, explicitly modeled on Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces and built to fold drone operations into every branch of the military at once. The comparison is not flattering: Britain currently fields around 10,000 drones, next to the roughly 200,000 Ukraine expends in a single month of fighting. The task force follows weeks of smaller signals in the same direction — the British Army fielding 10,000 drones under Project AKSA in late June, the Ministry exploring machine-vision targeting for strike drones, and the Royal Navy test-launching a Nyan one-way-attack drone from the trials ship XV Patrick Blackett as a first step toward carrier-based drone strikes. It adds up to a military trying to compress years of doctrine change into a single pre-summit sprint.

That sprint has an adversary attached to it, and it is no longer theoretical. The International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded this week that Russia's GRU had "highly likely" run a coordinated drone-surveillance campaign across a dozen NATO states between August 2024 and February 2026, using commercial vessels in coastal waters to launch small UAVs — probably Orlan-10s — over air bases including RAF Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Feltwell and Fairford. The first wave, in November 2024, coincided with infrastructure work to ready Lakenheath for the return of US B61 nuclear bombs; Britain's own Ministry of Defence investigation never identified a suspect. The same week, a Russian Tu-142 maritime patrol aircraft flew low and close past the carrier HMS Prince of Wales in the Norwegian Sea, dropping sonobuoys, until two 809 Naval Air Squadron F-35Bs intercepted and escorted it away — an incident the MoD called "unsafe and unprofessional," and a continuation of the carrier group's Arctic Sentry deployment that has produced a string of similar encounters since it launched jets from the same waters in mid-June.

All of this is landing on a government that will not be in office to see most of it through. Starmer announced his resignation as prime minister and Labour leader on June 22nd, after a bruising set of May local election results and open party revolt; nominations to succeed him open on July 9th, two days into the Ankara summit, with the contest required to conclude before the summer recess. Andy Burnham, who resigned his old seat to win a by-election in Makerfield by a bigger margin than pollsters expected, is the clear favourite, with former health secretary Wes Streeting already declaring for him. Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis has been explicit that the spending plan is as much a message to Burnham as to NATO, urging the incoming leader to keep the trajectory climbing toward 3.5 percent rather than let it stall at 2.7. Whoever wins inherits both the funding gap Whitaker complained about and the political room to close it — or not.

Paying for even this much has already meant trade-offs. The government cut its Strengthening Higher Education for Female Empowerment programme, a £45 million initiative meant to reach a million girls across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, only two years after launch — a casualty, ministers acknowledged, of aid cuts made to help fund the defence build-up, part of a wider reduction in UK aid to 0.3 percent of gross national income by 2027.

The domestic reckoning was not confined to the aid budget. Nigel Farage was referred to Parliament's standards watchdog after the Sunday Times reported he had failed to declare security, staff and a five-storey townhouse near Buckingham Palace funded by George Cottrell, a Reform UK ally who pleaded guilty to wire fraud in the United States in 2017; it is now the second live inquiry into Farage's undisclosed benefits, alongside an existing probe into a £5 million gift from cryptocurrency financier Christopher Harborne, at a moment when Reform's rise has made questions about Farage's own fitness for higher office increasingly pointed. In health, Health Secretary James Murray moved to force the same kind of accountability onto the NHS: after Donna Ockenden's review found a culture of cover-up in 520 potentially avoidable maternity cases at Nottingham University Hospitals, and senior clinicians simply refused to testify, Murray committed to applying the incoming Hillsborough Law's duty of candour retrospectively — with prison terms of up to two years for staff who withhold evidence — to compel witnesses not just in Nottingham but in parallel maternity inquiries already opening in Leeds and Sussex. A quieter, related measure, Benedict's Law, now makes allergy training and spare adrenaline pens compulsory in every English school from this term, becoming legally binding by 2027, after a five-year-old's death exposed how unevenly prepared schools were.

Britain's corporate landscape moved to its own rhythm this week, less about the state's finances than about who ends up owning what's left of British industry. EasyJet's board recommended a £5.2 billion takeover by the US investment fund Castlelake — after rejecting four lower offers, one of them dismissed as "highly opportunistic" — with Castlelake still needing to satisfy EU citizen-ownership rules before a firm offer is due by August 3rd. Sky, itself owned by America's Comcast, agreed to buy ITV's television and streaming arm, including ITVX, for £1.6 billion, folding one of Britain's oldest broadcasters into an American-owned one and raising fresh questions about the future of free-to-air, public-service television.

By the time Burnham — or whoever wins the contest that opens this week — reaches Downing Street, the numbers Starmer signed off in Ankara will already be fixed in the spending plan. What is not fixed is the trajectory beyond 2030, and that is the argument Whitaker was really having with a prime minister who will not be around to finish it.