Responding to Lord Richards, defence secretary John Healey said Labour was overseeing the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War, delivering on a manifesto commitment “three years before anyone believed we would do it”.
He welcomed Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to hike the UK’s defence budget from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with a further commitment to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2034.
Lord Richards said that as a result, Britain’s military would currently be unable to fight the conventional stage of a war and would be forced to turn immediately to using nuclear weapons.
The former chief of the defence staff warned it is “inevitable” that Russia will seek to test any defence force placed in Ukraine in the event of a deal to end the war.
Sir Keir Starmer has said he is prepared to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force if a deal to end the war is reached, even if it puts them “in harm’s way”.
