Kemi Badenoch is right to call for more defence spending |
Kemi Badenoch has announced a series of commitments on defence spending that she would implement if she were to become prime minister. This is an important and sensitive issue as the war in Ukraine continues and there are repeated warnings about the heightened threats to the UK. The Conservatives would reallocate £17 billion of public expenditure to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Badenoch said yesterday, because the ‘defence of the realm must be the first priority of any government’.
The most politically sharp-edged measure the Tories have announced is repurposing the National Wealth Fund (NWF), which Labour established to ‘increase investment… to accelerate delivery of the government’s growth and clean energy missions’. The NWF is not a sovereign wealth fund – despite its name – but a means of catalysing private-sector investment; in March, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, widened the NWF’s strategic priorities to include ‘investments in dual-use technologies… which better support the UK’s defence and security’.
The NWF remains predominantly directed towards what the Conservatives call ‘costly eco-projects’. It amounts to £28 billion, of which £7.5 billion has been committed already. Under the Tories, it would become the National Defence and Resilience Bank, with £11 billion of the balance transferred to the MoD and the rest spent on supporting wider national resilience. Cutting unrealistic climate targets in favour of the hard edge of the armed........