The lingering absence of a national plan for the defence of the UK is hard to comprehend given the potential for a wider war in Europe that was triggered by Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine more than a decade ago.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the head of the armed forces, told MPs on Monday that the main reason this country has been left so exposed is that successive governments reaped a so-called peace dividend since the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1991 and shifted funding into other priorities, such as welfare and health.
This is right to a point.
Read more: UK ‘has no plan for defending nation in event of war’
But the Conservatives under David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all collectively failed to switch the nation back to the kind of war-footing it was on during the Cold War in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s initial land grab in Crimea in 2014 and even after his full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022.
Alarm bells belatedly started to ring in the spring of 2024, when Sky News first reported the absence of any kind of national defence plan.
However, Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour Party then took over and still the sense of business as usual remained across Whitehall – including large parts of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
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There was no mention of the urgent need to rebuild national defence and resilience in the prime minister’s various pledges in his “plan for change”.
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Defence has finally jumped up the agenda, but clearly not far enough to ensure that he instructs the whole of government, led by the Cabinet Office, to focus singularly on drawing up at speed a modern version of the Government War Book – the previous blueprint to prepare the nation for the possibility of a transition from peace to war.
Sir Keir says that the UK needs to be ready for war, but there is little sign that any meaningful action is going on behind the scenes to prepare the whole of society for what that actually means.
