Welfare versus warfare - the PM has made his choice but faces the hardest fight of his premiership
Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to hike spending on defence and cut disability benefits - but now risks his first parliamentary defeat.
Wednesday 25 June 2025 03:10, UK
Welfare versus warfare: this is the week when tensions between the government's spending priorities are playing out in front of our very eyes.
The prime minister, arriving in The Hague on Tuesday for the NATO summit, announced that the UK was set to increase spending on defence, security and resilience to 5% of GDP in the next decade to meet an "era of radical uncertainty".
This is a big spending commitment, and one that has yet to be funded.
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Carl Emmerson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the increase, in Tuesday's terms, would be like adding approximately £30bn to the 2027 target of spending around £75bn on core defence.
But if you wanted the government to hammer home the need for warfare spending, read this from the new national security strategy, published on Tuesday: "For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario."
When I asked him about the threat, the PM told me the UK was "facing daily challenges on the home front", be that cybersecurity attacks on energy security as "energy is weaponised by our adversaries".
His foremost duty as PM, as he has told me time and again, is the security of his citizens.
But he is struggling to take his base with him and is facing a significant political challenge on the home front, as the tensions between funding warfare and cutting welfare come into view.
For while the PM stressed on Tuesday that the planned £5bn of welfare cuts the government is planning to push through is not to pay for defence spending (the increased budget, so far, has come from overseas development aid or the capital investment budget); he is clear-eyed, too, that the welfare bill is unsustainable and must be dealt with. This is about choices, and the prime minister is making his - in the face of opposition from his MPs and voters, too.
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This is perhaps going to be one of the hardest fights of his premiership to date.
A third of his backbenchers have signed an amendment to next week's welfare vote that could see his welfare reforms killed off. Take a moment to take that in: the prime minister, but a year from an election landslide, is eyeing the prospect of a parliamentary defeat. That is some mean feat when you have a working majority of 165 votes.
I don't need to tell you that defeat on a major policy area less than a year into government would be a serious blow for the prime minister.
When I put it to him that he was facing an "effective confidence vote in your leadership", he rejected that. He told me: "It's not a confidence vote. It's a vote. It's a vote about reform. It's about a vote about reform of our welfare system. It isn't working. It doesn't help people into work."
When I asked him if he was prepared to give concessions to the rebels, he said: "We are pressing on, with a vote on this, because we need to bring about this reform we were elected into government, to change that which is broken. [The] welfare system is broken. The progressive thing to do is to fix it so that it works for working people."
Senior insiders tell me that they need to face down the rebellion, rather than watering down the bill. There is a financial reason for that - the government needs to find the savings in its attempts to stick to the chancellor's fiscal rules and its economic plan.
There is also a political reason: having U-turned on winter fuel payments, Sir Keir can't do that again. So, roll in the massive whipping operation to try to whittle back this rebellion.
I think there will be another argument that comes into view too in the coming months, and that will come back to warfare versus welfare because this is about a national conversation about how we spend public money.
There are a couple of generations after me who have only ever lived in a peaceful world, who cannot remember, as I do, the Cold War or the moment the Berlin Wall came down. There are millions of Britons who for decades have taken the peace dividend of the post-Cold War period as governments cut back on defence spending and poured money into health, education and welfare instead.
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Sir Keir has a big argument in the coming days with his party about welfare cuts that so many of his MPs think are unfair. But he will have a bigger argument still with the public for the need to sacrifice spending on some public services in order to fund defence.
At a time when people are still struggling with the cost of living and are dissatisfied with public services, that's a really difficult argument to make. But this prime minister, eyeing a Russian aggressor, has made his choice.