Buying the DIP
We waited so long for... this?
The troubled British Defence Investment Plan (DIP), delayed by about ten months and leading to the fall of a several defence ministers and, arguably, the Prime Minister himself, was finally released yesterday. The main headlines of the UK’s defence budget amounts to £300 billion overall over the next four years (both capital and recurring expenditure), of which £15 billion is extra money. A massive proportion of this, over £60 billion, is spent on the nuclear deterrent, leaving not much else for all the other priorities. But there is a new £5 billion to be spent on drones and related tech. The plan also continues the commitment to the AUKUS submarine programme with Australia and the US as well as our plans to develop a sixth generation fighter jet with Japan and Italy. Those two programmes are phenomenally expensive and ambitious, and will certainly absorb a lot of defence money. It’s also questionable whether they are immediately relevant to the defence of our realm, rather than the maintenance of an idea that Britain remains a global military player.
It’s easy to respond to any defence plan with a knee-jerk “it’s not enough”, without proposing where the additional money might come from. What strikes me more is that “it’s not enough to come up with this after ten months”. This DIP seems to be a testament to the indecision and stasis of Starmerism. There’s nothing remarkable or bold about this plan, and nothing which wouldn’t have been reasonably obvious ten months ago. As far as I can work out, the only difference that the resignation of John Healey has made is an additional £1.5 billion squeezed out of cancelling a road programme in the midlands. Given that people like me often say things like “the government needs to make tough decisions on defence” I suppose we should recognise that the downgrading of plans for the A46 to be widened represents a tough choice. I am also struck that the area affected includes Robert Jenrick’s constituency as well as some Labour-held seats that are almost certainly going to be lost at the next election, so this looks like a carefully-chosen political option.
The sense that the plan isn’t really thought-through (in spite of the time it has taken to emerge) is further underlined by the fact that £5.6 billion of the new funding is still to be found in next year’s budget. It’s easy to say that Starmer was heading for the exit and couldn’t be bothered to finalise the funding arrangements, but that’s hardly an excuse for something that was supposed to have been ready last year. Furthermore, the plan doesn’t even measure up against the UK government’s own commitments. By its own claims, it plans to get spending up to 2.7% of GDP on defence with the interim target of 3% and the 2035 target of 3.5% still basically aspirational. This is in spite of Starmer himself giving a speech only a few weeks ago stating that Russia might attack NATO by 2030.
The real-world impacts of this indecision are in our economy, which is full of exciting defence start-ups with genuine innovation that are struggling to get anything serious in terms of funding out of the MOD. Many of these companies are turning to Germany and Denmark and other European allies since the UK is simply too slow, too unreliable and too bureaucratic to be worth dealing with. It’s come to something when German defence bureaucracy seems nimble and responsive compared to our own.
It’s still better to have a DIP than not have one. The DIP was an object lesson in the failings of the Starmer government. If it has succeeded in removing from office someone who was hard-working and well-meaning, but not suited to the challenges of being Prime Minister, perhaps it has served some purpose.