Keir Starmer's sums don't add up

Keir Starmer has announced a £13.4 billion increase in military spending to 2.5% of GDP, but his sums simply don't add up

Keir Starmer has announced a massive spending splurge to increase the UK’s military budget to 2.5% of GDP, rising to 3% in the next parliament.

Britain’s compliant media have tried to help him out my uncritically parroting the Labour Party line that Britain’s international aid budget will be slashed to "help fund" the move.

The problem is that the sums don’t even vaguely add up.

According to the Guardian "defence sources" have complained that increasing military spending by a whopping £13.4 billion per year still isn’t enough.

Increasing defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP amounts to something like a £5-6 billion increase. It’s hard to see how Starmer can justify telling the armed forces that they’re getting more than double that amount this year, nor why they think such an enormous figure is still inadequate.

Starmer’s team have briefed the press to talk up their cut in Britain’s international aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% 0f GDP, but the government had only allocated £13.3 billion for 2024/25, so there’d be shortfall even if the entire international aid budget was eliminated, just to get to Starmer’s £13.4 billion figure, let alone to his promise of 3% of GDP by the next parliament.

It’s not just basic maths that tells us his sums don’t add up, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has also warned that his Starmer’s figures are wrong, and accused him of being misleading too.

They’ve said that Starmer is "following in the steps of the last government by announcing a misleadingly large figure for the “extra” defence spending this announcement entails. An extra 0.2% of GDP is around £6bn, and this is the size of the cut to the aid budget. Yet he trumpeted a £13bn increase in defence spending".

Starmer’s decision to slash international aid also make an absolute fool of his Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who just three weeks ago criticised Trump’s destruction of the US foreign aid budget by saying that the move was "a big strategic mistake" which would allow China to "step in" and increase their global influence.

Lammy also said that the UK government "will do what we can to ameliorate" the damaging impact of the US foreign aid cuts.

It looks like Starmer’s gone straight over Lammy’s head and slashed 40% off his department’s aid budget, despite Lammy having just lectured the US on the folly of slashing international aid because it means handing more soft power opportunities to China!

And if slashing our own contribution to fighting global poverty by 40% is "ameliorating" the problem, it’s hard to imagine what exacerbating it would look like.

Whether we believe the UK government three weeks ago that slashing international aid is a massive boon to Chinese global power, or we believe the UK government of today, that it’s a fabulous idea, the sums still don’t add up.

There’s only so much international aid budget to slash away at, and it’s simply not enough to cover the military splurges that Starmer’s bragging about.

We know that Rachel Reeves won’t cover the cost by taxing the mega-rich, because she’s ruled that out as an option, and we know that she won’t borrow to cover the cost either because she’s so utterly obsessed with her myopic book-balancing exercises.

So who is going to pay the price of Starmer’s militaristic willy-waving?

Starmer and Reeves have already choked off any hope of economic recovery from Britain’s long austerity stagnation with his "things will get worse" doom-mongering and her new round of swingeing austerity cuts, and it’s obvious that even more economic doom and austerity cuts are inevitable.

Starmer’s overtly defended the idea of impoverishing the poorest in Britain in order to pay for his splurge by insisting that "the poorest people in this country would be the first to suffer if the security and safety of our country was put in peril".

It’s an absurd and politically reckless stance to imagine that people are just going to sit back and accept another round of attacks on their living standards, public services, and wages because a haircut in a suit is telling them that his militaristic willy-waving at Russia is somehow making them safer.

It’s especially reckless for Labour to further collapse living standards when it’s likely to drive even more people into the welcoming arms of the Reform UK Faragists, who’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill is currently in court accused of taking bribes from Russia in return for promoting Russian interests!

Charities and humanitarians are aghast at Starmer’s policy of raiding international aid to pay for his splurge, because the most needy people in the world will suffer; because it’s damaging to Britain’s international reputation; because it’s going to exacerbate the harm of Trump’s international aid cuts; and because undermining efforts to alleviate poverty at source is obviously going to exacerbate the global refugee crisis.

And anyone on the left should be aghast that he’s clearly planning to drive even more Brits into poverty too, not just because of the sheer malice of it, but because making ordinary people and ordinary communities poorer is just bad for the economy.

And even after all of the moral and economic objections, there’s still the fact that Starmer’s sums don’t even vaguely add up.

How are we supposed to trust his party to run the economy when he’s so inaccurate, to the tune of £billions of pounds per year?