Campaigners from the Global Campaign on Military Spending UK have reacted with outrage to the Prime Minister’s announcement today, 25th February, that he will seek to spend £13.4bn extra on the military from 2027. He made clear this increase will come from cutting support for the world’s most vulnerable people by slashing spending on overseas aid.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced what he described as “the biggest sustained increase” in military spending since the end of the Cold War. The aim is for UK military spending to be 2.5% of GDP from 2027 – and he has said that this will mean an extra £13.4bn spent every year. Including money for the intelligence services, the total figure will be 2.6% GDP. This figure will be maintained until at least the end of the current Parliament. Starmer also set out an ambition to raise military spending to 3% of GDP during the next Parliament. This ambition would require tens of billions of pounds more spending.
The increase to 2.5% will be funded by cutting the overseas development budget from the current 0.5% of Gross National Income to 0.3% starting in 2026. Starmer claimed that this would fully fund the increase in military spending.
Dr Stuart Parkinson, Co-Chair of GCOMS-UK, said “The Prime Minister’s announcement is appalling. It will rob the world’s most vulnerable of £13bn a year of hope. Committing to this until the end of the Parliament will reduce spending on overseas aid by a total of more than £40bn at a time when poverty is already rising, climate change is raging, and other countries have already made major cuts to development spending. People will suffer and lives will be lost as a result of this announcement. Keir Starmer should not be balancing the books on the backs of the world’s poorest. The obsession with ever-increasing military spending will not make us safer – it must be rethought.”
The Trump Administration in the United States has already announced swingeing cuts to their development budget through USAID – something UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said could be a “big strategic mistake”.
The government has come under pressure in recent weeks to increase military spending. US President Trump called on NATO members to increase military spending to 5% after stating that the United States had been contributing a disproportionate amount of the total military spending by the alliance. New NATO head Mark Rutte, who said the figure should be “north of 3%”.
Many people have expressed concerns about the feasibility of rapidly increasing the military spending budget, and in Parliament today many MPs expressed concerns about how efficiently the new money would be spent. Other MPs echoed the view that cuts to the overseas aid budget on the scale announced today will likely have devastating effects both in the UK and the wider world.
Image credit: Keir Starmer / X
