Keir Starmer is being dishonest about his military spending splurge

Keir Starmer's military spending splurge is characterised by dishonesty about where the money is coming from, and dishonesty about the consequences.

Keir Starmer has issued a grossly misleading public statement which claims that his military spending splurge will be good for the economy, and good for small businesses.

There are a lot of holes in Starmer’s claims.

The one that most people have pointed out is that if he wanted to "help smaller businesses" he wouldn’t offer them a few crumbs from the lavish banquet he’s setting up for massive arms companies, he’d offer them direct support.

How many small businesses are realistically going to benefit from contracts for air defence systems, tanks, and drones?

He’s hit hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses with increased employer National Insurance contributions, and he’s pretending to offset it with the hypothetical opportunity to go up against BAE systems, Thales, General Dynamics, Babcock, QinetiQ, Lockheed Martin, Rolls Royce, etc for arms supply contracts.

It’s a real cost offset by hypothetical benefits that wouldn’t be available to the vast majority of small businesses anyway (builders, shopkeepers, hairdressers, plumbers, window cleaners, delivery drivers …)

Then there’s the fact he’s not properly explained where the money is coming from.

Labour aggressively briefed the press that it was being paid for by a 0.2% GDP cut to the foreign aid budget, but this doesn’t even account for half of the £13.4 billion he’s claiming, let alone the tranches of direct military aid he keeps announcing to Ukraine (£3.5 billion in July 2024, another £1.6 billion in March 2025).

Add all of this together and it’s over £18 billion, while the cut in foreign aid is only worth around £6 billion.

In answering how much this spending is really going to boost the economy and "help put money in people’s pockets" we’d need to know where Starmer and Reeves are going to make cutbacks to "balance the books".

We know that Reeves is so utterly obsessed with her myopic austerity book balancing exercises that cuts will certainly be made to cover the cost of Starmer’s splurge, we just haven’t been told where yet.

Given their diabolical track record of mugging pensioners, refusing to lift Tory economic sanctions on families, fulminating against disabled people, and continuation of ruinous Tory austerity cuts, it seems highly likely that it’ll be the poor and ordinary who end up paying the price.

If the government does take £billions out of public services and ordinary people pockets to pay for Starmer’s splurge, it’s clearly an absolute lie that it’s going to make people better off.

Starmer knows this full-well, and that’s why he’s pretending that the foreign aid budget cut is enough to cover the significantly larger costs.

Then there’s the preposterous idea that Starmer’s military willy-waving at Russia, and his threats to put boots on the ground and aeroplanes in the skies of Ukraine is "bolstering national security" and making us safer.

It’s like purchasing a gold-plated stick to poke bears with, while claiming that it’s a necessary action to reduce the likelihood of angry bear attacks!

In conclusion Starmer is being grossly misleading in pretending international aid cuts will cover the cost of his splurge; he’s being deeply evasive about where the rest of the money is going to come from; it’s profoundly dishonest to claim net economic benefits when he’s refusing to say what he’s going to cut to pay for it; he’s offering small businesses hypothetical crumbs from the arms supply banquet while hammering them with actual National Insurance rises; and he’s taking us for fools if he thinks anyone is going to believe that military posturing and sending British forces to fight in Ukraine would make us safer.