British leader’s complacency on defense puts country ‘in peril,’ former NATO chief warns
By Ivana Kottasová, CNN
(CNN) — It’s not just the US President Donald Trump criticizing the British prime minister for being weak on defense. On Tuesday his own adviser George Robertson joined in, accusing Keir Starmer of a “corrosive complacency” that puts the United Kingdom “in peril.”
Speaking to the Financial Times Robertson, a former NATO chief, said there was a gap between Starmer’s rhetoric and his actions. He said the prime minister was unwilling to make the necessary investment to keep the UK safe, choosing instead to put money into “ever expanding welfare budget.”
Robertson is a key government adviser whom Starmer commissioned to conduct a strategic review of UK defense when he took over as prime minister after 14 years of Conservative rule.
When the review came out last year, Robertson and his two co-authors, Gen. Richard Barrons, former head of the Joint Forces Command, and Fiona Hill, a former senior director at the US National Security Council, were clear: decades of cuts and underinvestment have left the UK dangerously unprepared for a conflict.
The trio made their recommendations in no uncertain terms: the UK must rethink the resilience of its infrastructure, build up its armed forces, reserves and civil defense, and invest in its health service, industry and the economy, to allow a quick pivot to a war footing.
The government agreed with the assessment and promised to present a concrete a proposal of how to fund the much-needed overhaul. But the plan is yet to materialize, having been postponed several times.
A Downing Street spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday that the government “has delivered the largest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War” and that Starmer “is determined to ensure the Defence Investment Plan is fit for the threats that we face.” The spokesperson, did not provide any update on when the plan would be announced.
Barrons, Robertson’s co-author, has been vocal about the need to act quickly. Speaking last fall, he said that while the UK was moving in the right direction, at the current pace it would take the country about 10 years to be ready for a war.
“And our analysis and our allies are saying to us, well, maybe you’ve got three to five years,” he said, referring to the widely accepted intelligence assessment that Russia is preparing for the possibility of a direct conflict with Europe.
The strong words used by Robertson on Tuesday are even more powerful because he is a former Labour politician. He had, so far, refrained from criticizing the government publicly.
The Financial Times said that Robertson, Britain’s defense minister in Tony Blair’s government in the late 1990s, would accuse “non-military experts in the Treasury” of “vandalism” in a speech later on Tuesday.
Robertson’s intervention comes just weeks after Trump took aim at Starmer over his refusal to get involved in the conflict in the Middle East.
“This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” Trump said on March 3, later suggesting Britain was no longer “the Rolls-Royce of allies.”
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CNN’s James Frater contributed reporting.
