{"id":13064,"date":"2026-04-13T12:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T12:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/13064\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T12:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T12:28:09","slug":"does-kemi-badenoch-understand-britains-military-dysfunction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/13064\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Kemi Badenoch understand Britain\u2019s military dysfunction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, Kemi Badenoch used her address to the London Defence Conference to launch<\/a> a blistering attack on Britain\u2019s lack of military preparedness under the current Labour government. The Tory leader quoted a senior military commander, General Richard Barrons, who argued<\/a> last month that Britain\u2019s armed forces could at best hope to take a small market town in a modern conflict scenario.<\/p>\n

Badenoch said that a future Tory government would increase defence spending beyond the current 3% and find \u00a317 billion from other priorities, such as research into Net Zero, to launch a fund backing the nation\u2019s defence supply chains. She also promised to cut back supply-side constraints on the defence-industrial sector, including energy prices, red tape and ESG requirements.<\/p>\n

The Conservative leader is right to highlight the gulf between Keir Starmer\u2019s rhetoric and actions on defence, and her own proposals were broadly reasonable and well-evidenced. Yet this vision still rings hollow in terms of how big a change rearmament would actually be.<\/p>\n

For a start, Badenoch doesn\u2019t seem to recognise that her new defence spending target is wholly inadequate for the task of reversing 35 years of complacency on the issue. When it finally started dawning on Britain\u2019s leaders that war was on the cards in the mid-Thirties, they began spending more than double that figure, arguably starting from a far higher base than today.<\/p>\n

Cutting costs associated with Net Zero is important, but vast damage has already been done. This isn\u2019t so much about Britain\u2019s high-tech defence sector itself, which remains competitive, but instead the unglamorous basic industries that keep everything else working: steelmaking, oil refining, chemicals, fertilisers and materials production. Neglecting these means that ramping up other areas of production will be very difficult, and a nation contemplating the prospect of attritional war cannot hope to sustain itself on imports. That\u2019s especially true given the extent<\/a> to which Britain\u2019s navy has been hollowed out. Even with the right energy and deregulation policies, the task of rebuilding basic industrial capacity is the work of an entire generation, if not longer.<\/p>\n

Beyond the physical requirements, there is also the issue of national morale and sense of purpose. Britain\u2019s institutions, including the armed forces, appear to be bound up in proceduralism that is directed toward priorities unrelated to their core objectives. This is in order to fulfil obligations set out in reams of quasi-constitutional legislation, from the Public Sector Equality Duty to the Climate Change Act. Our new elites view the world in a distinctly post-national manner that is at odds with much of public opinion. The patriotic working-class communities that traditionally supplied the bulk of the country\u2019s fighting men are disillusioned with the direction in which Britain has travelled in recent decades, another factor in the declining numbers<\/a> of young people enlisting for military service.<\/p>\n

Preparing Britain for a major war would require changing almost everything about the way the country has been run since 1990. Most importantly, it would require reorienting huge amounts of spending from health and welfare towards defence. Labour won\u2019t do this, and Badenoch is right to point out that Starmer\u2019s posturing lacks credibility. In an ideal world, she might be up for some of the challenges of changing the country along these lines. But it would entail a degree of radicalism the Conservatives have not displayed in a very long time indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Saturday, Kemi Badenoch used her address to the London Defence Conference to launch a blistering attack on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,2108,3724,94,186,31,474,462],"class_list":{"0":"post-13064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-british-army","10":"tag-conservative-party","11":"tag-keir-starmer","12":"tag-kemi-badenoch","13":"tag-labour-party","14":"tag-uncategorized","15":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116397402169832764","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}