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George Robertson’s attack on the Starmer government ignores the seeds sown during his own tenure, or the 28-year trend that all parties have followed.
When Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen took to the podium in Salisbury earlier this month to deliver the Edward Heath Annual Lecture, he did so with the moral authority of a man who had served as Secretary of State for Defence, who had led NATO for four years, and who had personally authored the current government’s Strategic Defence Review. His language was unsparing. Britain, he declared, was “underprepared, underinsured, under attack and not safe.” The Iran war must be a “rude wake-up call.” There was, he said, “corrosive complacency today in Britain’s political leadership.” (It’s worth noting that the ‘Iran War’ was a preventive and therefore illegal attack by Israel and its ally the United States, so not quite the ‘wake-up call’ suggested by Robertson).
The criticism made headlines. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch used all six of her PMQs questions to hammer the Prime Minister with Robertson’s own words. Defence Secretary John Healey was, by Robertson’s own account, “extremely angry” at the intervention. It was, in short, a significant moment: a senior Labour grandee publicly attacking his own government on national security.
But before my punditry settles into its familiar grooves, it is worth pausing to examine Lord Robertson’s record more carefully. Because the trajectory he condemns – a hollowing out of Britain’s armed forces, a failure to fund commitments, a disregard for the welfare of service personnel, did not begin with Keir Starmer, nor with the governments that preceded him. It began, in very large measure, with the Blair government that Robertson himself served, and with the Treasury stewardship of the Chancellor whose priorities he enabled.
Promises Built on Sand – Robertson’s own Strategic Defence Review
Robertson’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review was, on paper, an ambitious document. It promised modernisation, new expeditionary capabilities, logistical investment, and a “force for good” in the world. It envisioned two new aircraft carriers, a rapid reaction force, and increased numbers of engineers and signallers. Robertson presented it as a new dawn for British defence.
What he did not disclose publicly at the time, and what has since been confirmed by the then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie was that from the outset, the MoD accepted a financial settlement with the Treasury that underfunded the review’s implementation by approximately £500 million per year. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was explicit: his priorities were social welfare, child poverty, and international development. Defence, in Brown’s hierarchy, came a distant fourth. The SDR Robertson authored was, from the moment of its signing, an increasingly underfunded aspiration.
This is not a retrospective judgement born of hindsight. Senior military figures said so at the time. The gap between the review’s stated ambitions and its financial reality was apparent within years. Robertson’s response was to leave the Defence brief for NATO in 1999, handing the poisoned chalice onward.
A legacy Measured in Numbers
The human cost of that period is stark when set out in plain figures. When Labour came to power in May 1997, the UK Regular Forces totalled approximately 210,000 personnel. By the time Labour left office in May 2010, that figure had fallen to around 178,000 (a reduction of roughly 28 per cent) in a period when those same forces were simultaneously committed to active combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Royal Navy fared particularly badly. In 1997 there were 35 escort vessels (frigates and destroyers) available to defend Britain’s sea lanes, protect the nuclear deterrent, and project power and support emergent humanitarian missions globally. By 2010, that number had fallen to 23: a reduction of 12 escorts in thirteen years. The Naval Service also contracted from approximately 48,000 personnel to 36,000. The carrier HMS Invincible was decommissioned. The Sea Harrier was retired. The planned 12 Type 45 destroyers were slashed first to 8, and then to 6.
The Royal Air Force lost half its fast jet squadrons under Labour. Where there had been 23 in 1997, only 12 remained by 2010. The RAF’s overall manpower requirement was cut by 7,500. Tornado F3 squadrons were disbanded ahead of schedule, three Jaguar squadrons were cut earlier than planned, and RAF Coltishall was closed. The force was being hollowed out in real time, even as it was being deployed on two active fronts.
The Army, meanwhile, was being ground down by the dual pressures of Treasury parsimony and operational overstretch. By Robertson’s own account, the MoD underfunded the implementation of his SDR by half a billion pounds a year. General Guthrie described repeatedly crossing swords with Brown to try to protect Army funding. The result was that troops in Afghanistan and Iraq found themselves without adequate helicopters, protected vehicles, or body armour – a scandal that would eventually provoke a formal inquiry.
Paying the Price: The Military Covenant Betrayed
Robertson now argues that Britain “cannot defend” itself with an expanding welfare budget, and that the welfare-to-defence ratio is fundamentally wrong. It is an argument that deserves scrutiny, not least because his own government was directly responsible for systematically degrading the terms and conditions of service that might attract and retain the personnel he now wants to see recruited.
Under Blair and Brown, pay for junior service personnel fell behind comparable civilian wages to such a degree that the serving head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, publicly stated that some junior soldiers were earning less than traffic wardens. This was not a casual observation, it was a carefully calculated intervention by a serving Chief of the General Staff, aimed at shaming the government into action.
Beyond pay, the Labour government’s pension reform of 2005 introduced a new Armed Forces Pension Scheme (AFPS 05) for all new entrants that was measurably less generous than the AFPS 75 it replaced (and it nearly caused mutiny when suggestions were made to extend it retrospectively which would have harmed personnel engaged in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan). Parliament’s own Defence Committee found that the new scheme had been drawn up with what it described as “an emphasis on managing cost rather than achieving best practice,” and was openly critical of the government for exploiting the fact that service personnel, unlike civilian workers, have no trade union representation. The scheme’s value was assessed at 22 per cent of pensionable pay, against the 24.5 per cent of the scheme it replaced. The old scheme was 11.36 per cent more valuable. The government chose the cheaper option.
The Royal British Legion, hardly a politically partisan organisation, launched its “Honour the Covenant” campaign during the Blair-Brown years, calling for higher compensation for the wounded and better treatment for veterans and their families. It was a public declaration that the unwritten contract between the nation and its service personnel – the Military Covenant, had been broken.
The Nimrod Catastrophe: A case study in institutional failure
Perhaps no single episode illustrates the consequences of Labour’s approach to defence procurement more vividly than the Nimrod MRA4 disaster. It deserves particular attention in any honest assessment of Britain’s current capability gaps, because it left this island nation, which depends on maritime trade and whose nuclear deterrent requires undetected submarine passage – without any dedicated maritime patrol aircraft for nearly a decade. Thankfully France stepped up along with Norway and Denmark to plug the GIUK gap, so to speak.
The story begins before Labour’s election, with the contract for a Nimrod MR2 replacement awarded to British Aerospace in December 1996. The plan was to remanufacture 21 existing airframes, fitting new wings, new engines, and new avionics, with entry into service projected for April 2003. It was a fixed-price contract worth £2 billion. What the contractors discovered, almost immediately, was that the Nimrod airframes delivered by the RAF had not been built to a common standard. No two aircraft were quite the same. The entire premise of the refurbishment (that the airframes were interchangeable) was false.
By 1999, the programme was already three years behind schedule. The number of aircraft to be procured fell progressively from 21 to 9. Costs escalated from £2 billion to over £4 billion. By the time the final cancellation came in 2010, the programme was £789 million over its revised budget and more than nine years late. Not a single aircraft entered operational service. Every completed airframe was subsequently scrapped.
Several millions of pounds have been saved, but a massive gap in British security has opened. Vulnerability of sea lanes, unpredictable overseas crises, and traditional surface and submarine opposition will continue to demand versatile responsive aircraft.
Letter to the Daily Telegraph signed by six former service chiefs following the MRA4 cancellation
The consequences were precisely as the military had predicted. Following the retirement of the Nimrod MR2 fleet in March 2010, Russian submarines were able to transit British territorial waters without being tracked, because no suitable aircraft existed to track them. In November 2014, when a Russian submarine was spotted in British territorial waters off the west coast of Scotland, the UK had to request maritime patrol aircraft from France, Canada, and the United States to operate out of RAF Lossiemouth. An island nation that had once prided itself on sovereignty of its own sea lanes was dependent on allies for the most basic element of maritime surveillance.
The UK did not recover this capability until 2020, when the first Boeing P-8 Poseidon, purchased at a further cost of £3 billion, reached initial operating capability. The maritime reconnaissance gap lasted a full decade. That gap opened on Labour’s watch and was a direct consequence of the procurement choices and budget pressures that Robertson’s own government oversaw.
28 years of erosion: Defence on the Cliff Edge
It would be both unfair and inaccurate to lay the entirety of Britain’s defence decline at the door of the Blair and Brown governments alone. The Conservative and Coalition governments of 2010 to 2015 reduced the Army from 102,000 to 82,000 trade-trained personnel through the Strategic Defence and Security Review of 2010, itself a response to the fiscal catastrophe that accompanied the financial crisis. The 2021 Defence Command Paper under Boris Johnson reduced the Army target further still, to 72,500. Successive governments of all parties have, when faced with the choice between maintaining defence capability and funding other priorities, chosen to run down the forces.
The current Labour government under Keir Starmer has committed to raising defence spending from 2.3 to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with a trajectory towards 3 per cent. Starmer has declined to match Robertson’s call for welfare spending to be cut to fund defence. This is, of course, a political choice that can be debated. But it is not a novel choice, nor a uniquely negligent one. It is the latest iteration of a disposition that has characterised British governments across all parties since the end of the Cold War.
Robertson knows this. He was part of it. His government oversaw one of the most dramatic reductions in British military capability of the post-war era – not in a period of peace, but during two active wars. He championed a defence review that was underfunded from the moment of its conception. He served a Chancellor who treated defence as a competitor to social spending, and did not resign over it. He left for NATO while the consequences of the 1998 SDR’s funding gap were still working their way through the system.
Throwing hypocrisy stones in a glass house
None of this is to suggest that Robertson’s current warnings are wrong in substance. They are not. Britain does face serious capability gaps. Recruitment and retention are in crisis, a crisis whose roots lie, in significant part, in the decades of degraded pay, housing, pensions, and conditions that made a military career less attractive than it once was. The Nimrod gap, and others like it, are real. The growing threat environment demands a serious response. All of that is true.
But the moral authority with which Robertson delivers these warnings is considerably diminished by his own record. He speaks of “corrosive complacency” in political leadership. He does not mention that he served a government that sent troops to Iraq without adequate equipment, that cut the escort fleet from 35 to 23, that halved the number of fast jet squadrons, that introduced a less generous pension scheme for new recruits, and that presided over a procurement catastrophe, the Nimrod MRA4 which left Britain effectively blind and vulnerable its own territorial seas for a decade.
He argues that welfare spending must be rebalanced in favour of defence. He does not mention that it was his party’s Chancellor who explicitly chose welfare over defence, year after year, while Robertson was either in government or leading NATO.
He condemns Starmer for not funding his Strategic Defence Review. He does not mention that his own Strategic Defence Review of 1998 was underfunded by half a billion pounds a year from its very inception.
There is a phrase that fits Lord Robertson’s current posture rather well. It comes from the same tradition of plain English that he himself invoked in Salisbury. Those who live in glass houses, it counsels, should not throw stones.
Cautious is the word…
The Starmer government’s approach to defence spending is cautious, incremental, and shaped by fiscal constraint. It is also, viewed against the full sweep of the past 28 years, entirely consistent with the tradition that Robertson helped to establish. The question of how much Britain should spend on its armed forces, and what should be traded off to fund that spending, is a legitimate and urgent debate. Lord Robertson is entitled to participate in it. He is not entitled to do so as though he bears no responsibility for the position in which Britain now finds itself.
