There is a phrase that gets used about defence spending in this country with increasing desperation: "we are committed". The Government is committed. NATO partners are committed. Every minister in front of every camera is committed. The trouble is that commitment without cash is just talk, and talk does not stop Russian tanks. The numbers tell their own story, and the numbers are bleak.
The Hague Pledge Versus the Hague Cheque
At the Hague NATO summit, Britain signed up to a new alliance-wide target of 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence spending, plus a further 1.5 per cent on broader defence and security infrastructure. Five per cent in total. The deadline is 2035. Britain currently spends 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence. Labour has committed to reach 2.5 per cent by 2027, or 2.6 per cent if you include intelligence and security spending in the basket.
Look at that gap. The official plan gets us to roughly half of what we signed up for, on a timetable that ends two years before the threat we are supposedly preparing for actually arrives. The Strategic Defence Review, published last June, identified Russia as a short-term threat. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, warned in December that the alliance should prepare for a Russian attack within five years. We are not five years away from being ready. On current plans, we are a decade away — and the decade hasn't started.
The Real Cost of the Last Twenty Years
This didn't happen overnight. The hollowing-out of the British armed forces has been a cross-party failure stretching back to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. The Army is down to 73,000 regulars. Recruitment targets are routinely missed. Frigate numbers are at a post-war low. RAF Typhoon squadrons have been trimmed. Munitions stockpiles have been run down to dangerous levels by donations to Ukraine that the British government did not have the industrial capacity to replace.
You cannot sign up to a five per cent NATO target while running an army that struggles to field a single deployable division. You cannot deter Russia with policy papers. You deter Russia with hulls, brigades, missiles, and credible reserves — none of which the current Labour plan delivers within the timeline the threat requires.
The Treasury Will Say There's No Money
And here is where the conversation always ends. The Chancellor will explain that there are "fiscal constraints". The OBR will be invoked. Pensions, the NHS, debt interest — all the queue ahead of defence in the spending review will be paraded out as reasons we cannot afford to honour our own NATO pledge. But the same Government found £13 billion for the two-child benefit cap reversal. The same Government is presiding over an asylum hotel bill running into multiple billions a year. The same Government is pushing net zero spending commitments that NESO has costed at trillions over the next twenty-five years.
It is not that there is no money. There is no will. Britain spends what its political class chooses to spend. The choices being made are choices that put welfare, climate ideology, and asylum hotels ahead of the basic constitutional duty of any government — to defend the country.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat the NATO five per cent target as the floor, not the ceiling, and we would reach it earlier than 2035. We would rebuild the British defence industrial base so that munitions, drones, missiles, and warships can be produced at scale here, not sourced abroad on long lead times. We would restore Army headcount. We would invest in the Reserve. We would scrap the net zero industrial strategy and redirect a portion of those resources to defence manufacturing. And we would tell the truth to the British public: deterring Russia costs real money, and the money has to come from somewhere.
If the Government cannot or will not match its rhetoric with cash, it should at least stop pretending. Britain promised five per cent. Britain is delivering 2.3 with a sluggish glide path to 2.5. The men and women being asked to defend us deserve better than a speech.