UK Defence Review Chief Says PM Has Not Launched Pledged National Security Conversation

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the former NATO Secretary-General who led the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on 27 April that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has still not launched the promised national conversation on defence and security. Robertson said he had reminded the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions about the commitment, which was recommendation 26 of the review, but the government has failed to act.

"Despite me reminding the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions about his commitment to it, the Government have not started this conversation," Robertson told MPs. He added that he understood there had been "a conversation about a conversation recently inside the Ministry of Defence, but there are no signs of it outside it." The SDR had called for "a two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends, the role wider society must play in the UK's security and resilience."

Robertson noted that Starmer had accepted all the review's recommendations, making the inaction on this one particularly difficult to explain. He warned that NATO expects a potential armed attack before the end of the decade, now three years away, and said: "You would have thought that it is a matter of some urgency." Robertson added: "It would be horrible to think that it would take an actual crisis, an actual attack on the United Kingdom, before we woke up to the kinds of threats that are facing us."

Dr Fiona Hill, who co-authored the SDR, told the committee the problem was partly one of narrative. She said the public tended to think of war only in kinetic terms while the country is already experiencing tens of thousands of cyberattacks on a daily or weekly basis, risks to critical national infrastructure and subsea cables, and economic disruption from events such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. "It would be very easy to have most of daily life brought to a halt, but that is not being explained to the British public," she said. Hill said the UK had never had its equivalent of Germany's Zeitenwende moment, the fundamental reckoning that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, noting that even the Salisbury poisonings had failed to produce one. "We had the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, which turned him into a dirty bomb spreading polonium all over London. There was the poisoning of the Skripals with enough Novichok to take out all of Salisbury. Even that did not have an effect," she said.