US President Donald Trump isn’t just criticizing the British Prime Minister for being weak on defense. On Tuesday, he was joined by his own adviser George Robertson, accusing Keir Starmer of putting the UK at “risk” due to his “corrupt complacency”.
In an interview with the Financial Times, former NATO chief Robertson said there was a gap between Starmer’s words and actions. He said the Chancellor was reluctant to make the investment needed to keep Britain safe, choosing instead to funnel money into an “ever-expanding welfare budget”.
Mr Robertson is a key government adviser who commissioned Mr Starmer to carry out a strategic review of Britain’s defence, when he became prime minister after 14 years in Conservative government.
When the review was published last year, Robertson and two of his co-authors, former Joint Forces Commander Gen. Richard Barrons and former National Security Council Senior Director Fiona Hill, were clear: Decades of cuts and underinvestment have left Britain dangerously unprepared for conflict.
The three made their recommendations in no uncertain terms. The UK needs to rethink the resilience of its infrastructure, build up its military, reserve and civil defence, and invest in its health services, industry and economy to enable a rapid transition to wartime readiness.
The Government agreed with this assessment and pledged to provide concrete proposals on how to fund the much-needed review. However, this plan has been postponed many times and has yet to materialize.
A Downing Street spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday that the government had “delivered the largest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War” and that Mr Starmer was “determined to ensure that our defense investment plans are adapted to the threats we face”. A spokesperson did not provide an update on when the plan would be announced.
Robertson’s co-author, Barrons, has been vocal about the need to act quickly. In a speech last autumn, he said that although Britain was moving in the right direction, at the current pace it would take around 10 years to be ready for war.
“Our analysis and our allies say we’re probably going to have three to five years,” he said, referring to the widely accepted intelligence assessment that Russia is preparing for the possibility of direct conflict with Europe.
The strong words Mr Robertson used on Tuesday are made even more powerful because he is a former Labor politician. He has so far refrained from criticizing the government in public.
The Financial Times reported that Robertson, who was British defense minister in Tony Blair’s government in the late 1990s, will accuse “non-military experts at the Treasury” of “sabotage” in a speech later on Tuesday.
Mr Robertson’s intervention comes just weeks after President Trump attacked Mr Starmer for refusing to get involved in the Middle East conflict.
“We’re not dealing with Winston Churchill,” President Trump said on March 3, later suggesting Britain was no longer the “Rolls Royce of allies.”
