Burnham should beware uncanny echoes of the 1930s on defence

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The writer is an FT contributing editor

“The Guilty Men.” Such was the description bestowed on Britain’s political leaders by three journalists, writing under the pseudonym “Cato”, when Adolf Hitler’s armies marched across Europe in 1940. The indictment was that ministers had failed to re-arm after the Nazis took power. The polemic was a bestseller. The reputations of the culprits were indelibly stained. 

Andy Burnham, readying himself to replace Sir Keir Starmer, has signalled that he wants to be a domestic policy leader, spending time at a new prime ministerial outpost in Manchester rather than at security conferences in Munich and suchlike. But he cannot escape a disordered world. If today’s politicians have learnt anything from the Covid pandemic, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Donald Trump’s war against Iran, it is that prosperity and stability at home are inextricable from events abroad. 

The 2020s are not the 1930s and, for all his aggression, Putin is not Hitler. The parallels are no less uncomfortable for that. Now, as then, Europe’s democracies are trapped in economic stagnation and weighed down by debt. The old elites are besieged by populists. America is again sitting it out as a revanchist tyrant seeks to overturn Europe’s territorial settlement.

Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader who dominated the coalition National government before assuming the premiership in 1935, looms large in Cato’s account. Arraigned at the time by figures such as Winston Churchill for the feeble response to Hitler’s military build-up, Baldwin had his excuses. The priority, he protested, had been to haul the economy out of depression. The Treasury’s devotion to fiscal rules barred an increase in the national debt to allow more money for the military. Crucially, the voters were in no mood to sacrifice butter for guns.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is not much different from Starmer’s reasoning. He would have liked to have done more, but economic and political realities intervened. The long-delayed defence investment plan, published this week, did include a small financial top-up to the draft that prompted the resignation of his former defence secretary John Healey last month. By Healey’s account, however, it still does not match up to the risks in a world marked by Putin’s war, the myriad conflicts in the Middle East, an assertive China and a unilateralist America.

Britain, like fellow members of Nato, is committed to increasing core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of national output by 2035. On his last big international outing at next week’s Nato summit in Ankara, Starmer will say it is on track to meet the target. His Nato colleagues can be forgiven for deep scepticism. 

In spite of a £15bn rise in spending compared to previous plans, the DIP trajectory scarcely offers anything resembling a credible path to the target. The overall defence budget is set to rise only slightly from 2.6 per cent of output in 2026-27 to 2.7 per cent in 2029-30. Everyone is then asked to take a huge leap of faith and assume almost unprecedented increases during the early 2030s. By then, of course, there will have been a general election.

These figures carry uncanny echoes. When Hitler took power in 1933, Britain’s defence spending stood at 2.9 per cent of output. In the face of much faster German rearmament it crept up only to 3.2 per cent by 1935/36. The momentum only really picked up after a vastly expanded Wehrmacht had marched into the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936.  

If Burnham is unconvinced by historical comparisons, he need only glance at the government’s own strategic defence review. The military has been hollowed out by the decades-long post-cold war squeeze. The army is too small to deploy an effective force and the navy struggles to maintain in service even a much-diminished fleet. The Ukraine war has exposed big gaps in capabilities ranging from air defence to missiles, drones and integrated weapons systems.

Assuming he takes office later this month, Burnham will face the same constraints as Starmer and, indeed, as Baldwin. The voters need to know why sacrifices are needed. The answer is that the costs of inaction are potentially many times higher. 

Baldwin’s unforgivable mistake was to abandon deterrence — in effect, inviting Hitler to conclude that Britain lacked resolve. The prewar appeasement associated with Neville Chamberlain was an almost inevitable consequence. Nowhere are Britain’s latest plans being examined more closely than in Moscow. Burnham might ask what Putin will make of them.