The old ‘warfare v welfare’ arguments are back – but it’s Britain’s real duty to spend on both | Frances Ryan

While we need protecting from foreign enemies, slashing benefits in favour of defence will make millions less, not more, safe

A s the row over the military budget grows, Keir Starmer has spent much of the past few days insisting he’s spending huge sums of taxpayer money on defence. Every single government department has made cuts to fund next month’s defence investment plan (Dip), the prime minister promised , resulting in “ the biggest sustained increase since the cold war”. On Sunday, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the BBC that cabinet ministers have been asked to look for further reductions to help fund defence.

Now squint and replace the word “defence” with “welfare”. Imagine Starmer – or any prime minister for that matter – boasting they’ve pinched cash from the NHS or schools to boost benefit payments. Indeed, swap “defence” for any sort of progressive cause – think housing, social care or net zero – and you’d be hard-pressed to picture a politician trying to save their career by pledging vast levels of spending, let alone if that spending was lifted from the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Call it two-track governance, generously funding the military is seen as prudent and necessary but doing the same to improve the lives of ordinary people is wasteful and optional. Just look at how, when Wes Streeting criticised Starmer’s handling of the defence budget last week, he lamented the £4.5bn the government is set to spend on walking and cycling projects . That the former health secretarywill presumably be well aware such initiatives ultimately pay for themselves in improved public health outcomes just doesn’t fit with the narrative. A stronger military is an investment; a healthy and happy population is frivolous.

To question this double standard is not to say that there is not a good case for more defence spending. The world undeniably feels increasingly unsafe, with conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and an irate Donald Trump in the White House. As if to prove the point, at the weekend, British armed forces intercepted a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the Channel.

The MoD also has a funding gap; latest figures show a £18bn black hole, of which the Treasury has found £13.5bn to plug. But in that way, defence is no different from any other government department – all of which have pressing needs and limited resources – and yet it rarely receives the same level of scrutiny. The smallest change to social security, for example, is greeted with endless incensed front pages, while ministers can spend billions of pounds on weapons without a single pundit debating the details.

Any slight diversion from this status quo – even by a figure such as Starmer, who just last year slashed the international aid budget by almost half to pay for a higher defence budget – is greeted, at best, with suspicion, and worse, outright hysteria. As the Daily Mail’s front page put it on Friday: “Britain left defenceless. God help us!”

It is not just that “progressive spending” is treated differently than defence expenditure – it’s that the two are increasingly pitted against each other. Within hours of John Healey resigning as defence secretary , Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, took to social media to declare : “The government is happy to splurge vast amounts of money on disability benefits for those who don’t need them … and yet defence has gone back to the bottom of the pile.” Not to be outdone, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has since written to the prime minister to offer to work together to reduce benefit spending to invest in defence for “the national interest”.