Why we're in the dark on defence under Andy Burnham

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11Everyone is a bit in the dark when it comes to Andy Burnham's plans for defending the UK. This is why.

0:22How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Hello all, Neil here. and as the likelihood that Andy Burnham will be our next Prime Minister grows by the day, so do the questions about what exactly he plans to do when he is.

1:04And when it comes to defence, you can certainly understand why. First and most obviously, there's the money. We lost a defence secretary recently, John Healy, claiming Downing Street wouldn't adequately fund our military. Then there's a NATO summit on the 7th of July at which Starmer will be announcing, guess what, his plans for defence spending before heading for the door marked political exit. But more than that, one of the most difficult decisions any politician will ever have to take is whether to agree to military action. And Burnham's been there before. If we had left Saddam in place at that time, other people would have suffered.

1:41You know, there wasn't a kind of easy answer, was there? Since the Iraq war of 2003, he's certainly moved from full on interventionist to a more nuanced, perhaps at times opaque position. Do we get a sense that he gets it, that he gets the new world that we're living in? I think the jury's out. So when it comes to defence, who is Andy Burnham? Sky's political correspondent is Rob Powell. Sean Bell is our military analyst.

2:10Sean, let's get started with you. I mean, just how destabilising, I suppose is the word, is it that currently we have a prime minister and a defence secretary who in all likelihood are not going to be there in a handful of weeks. I think the most critical thing is we're coming up to the 7th and the 8th of next month is this big NATO conference at Ankara. We have, as a nation, made some commitments to NATO. Part of that is to get 3 % GDP spending by 2030, 3.5 % by 2035. And yet the current plan, currently endorsed by the Prime Minister, is 2.68%. Well short. And it's comfortably short. We had a strategic defence review.

2:48It was accepted that it reflected the risks that face this country. The Defence Investment Plan, which should have been out over a year ago, has not been properly funded. And therefore, it doesn't matter who's in control. When we get to that critical summit, the danger, of course, is Andy Burnham is not going to take over at the very earliest until after that. That leaves a major conundrum for that conference. Really, though, you don't mean it doesn't matter who's in the job. What you're actually meaning is, wouldn't it be better if Keir Starmer and whoever is the Defence Secretary right now, because it is in a state of flux, just goes and goes as soon as possible so the next lot can actually set out their stall?

3:24In some respects, it's about the government's commitment to defence. There's been pretty clear to everybody now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we are in a very dangerous environment. America's support under NATO first looks increasingly fragile. The SDR painted a very, very good picture of what the future looks like. And unless we start getting to grips with that and funding it properly, for most of my military career, we were funding defence at 4%. Certainly in the Cold War, it was all the time. We've saved over a trillion pounds by dropping defence because we haven't needed to spend it. Today, we need to get back to spending it.

3:56Otherwise, we're vulnerable. And the best way to deter our enemies is to prepare for that conflict. I mean, Rob, all the way down there in Westminster, politically, where do we put Andy Burnham on the sliding scale of defence? Is he a dove? Is he a hawk? Is he somewhere in between? Andy Burnham's a politician that is generally dealt in the sort of domestic social issues his whole career, whether it was health secretary during the Blair years, Manchester mayor. He hasn't had a lot to do with foreign affairs or defence. And I think that that's why it's quite difficult to sort of get a read on where his instinct lies, kind of where his heart is on some of this stuff.

4:35It's also why I think some people think there probably should be a bit more scrutiny and a bit more of a contest to try and get to the bottom of what he thinks. But I think if you were to look back over the times where he has sort of interacted in his career, his voting record, things like that, I don't think you would put him on the extreme in either direction. I think you'd probably say he was quite comfortably in the middle and in the mainstream, generally on defence and foreign affairs issues. He doesn't tend to have had a record of kind of breaking out in a noticeably extreme direction on any issues.

5:03But look, I think part of the reason he's been brought in is because he has that closer focus on social and domestic issues. And I think that inevitably is going to mean it's going to be interesting to see who he puts around him when it comes to defence and foreign policy. Because, you know, what does Andy Burnham think about the sort of tilt of power out east? What does he think about the changing face of warfare in the modern age? It's very hard to answer that question. I imagine there is some deep thinking going on around Team Burnham right now. But I imagine there is also an attempt to bring in some people that maybe have some deeper experience and background in these areas, because it's not the area where Andy Burnham has really worked in in his political career so far.

5:43But on the biggest foreign policy decision of the last 20 odd years, the decision to go to war in Iraq with the United States. I mean, he was wholeheartedly in support of that. You fast forward a decade and he's supporting strikes on Islamic State within Iraq. Then he found a moral compass or at least a reason not to vote in favour of military action when it came to Islamic State in Syria. I just wonder whether or not what we have seen from Andy Burnham is kind of political cherry picking of where the best position is at that particular point. Or have we actually seen an evolution in his thinking on defence, on war?

6:19Yeah, I think to an extent that sort of proof that he has moved with wherever the centre of gravity has been. He hasn't necessarily, and that's not to make a kind of moral judgment on each of those votes and each of those issues, but it's just to say that Andy Burnham in all of those hasn't necessarily kicked back or pushed against where it felt the centre of gravity in the political mainstream was going. In terms of Iraq, I was having a little flick through his book that he wrote with Steve Rotherham a couple of years ago to try and find references to defence. There's not a lot around defence, barely anything, if anything, in there.

6:52But he does have quite an interesting passage about that vote on the Iraq war. He says in here, this was two years ago, he can still justify now the decision to remove Saddam. What I can't justify was the absence of a credible plan to secure the country in the aftermath. Had he known that back then, he would have voted against it. I actually think that maybe his position is still that he would be moving with the political centre of gravity in that it feels like the broader political landscape around wars, foreign interventions, obviously shifted profoundly after Iraq. And I don't think you would find Andy Burnham as a prime minister kicking back against that consensus too much.

7:29I think he clearly would have still been very sceptical around the Iran war. I think he probably would have been in exactly the same position that Starmer found himself in, in terms of not letting the US use UK bases as well. Sean, just pick up on that in the sense that, well, I suppose we have been here before. I mean, Tony Blair arrived in number 10 with a blank sheet of paper, headed foreign policy, and a blank sheet of paper, headed defence. So what do you think he should be doing? What Rob's described, and what you're describing, are wars of choice. At the end of the Cold War, ever since then, most of the military leaders have got beltloads of medals because we've been involved almost continuously, whether it's Kosovo, Bosnia, Sarajevo, invasion of Iraq, tours in Afghanistan.

8:07I spent two years of my life in Afghanistan. The fact remains, they were all wars of choice. We chose to do them and we justified doing them. That is not what we're talking about today. What we're talking about today is wars of national survival. It's a completely different landscape. We've not been investing in that. We're horribly vulnerable, particularly with things like missile defence and the like. So I do think whilst people's vote in terms of, do you go in these foreign expeditions, that that's all jolly interesting. But this is much more profound than that. It's how the number one priority of any government is protecting the nation.

8:39That's what we're talking about here. Do you think that the public understands the urgency with which we need to get defence sorted? Do you think that the public understands the danger that the United Kingdom is facing right now? No, I don't. And I think that's one of the issues that all our politicians, I mean, let's be brutally honest, most politicians would admit privately that their number one priority is to get re-elected. and votes, there are no votes in defence. And therefore, people have a great deal of confidence. Their military is fantastic. They outsource defence to their military without necessarily feeling the heat.

9:10I travel through Poland on the way out to Ukraine. They feel the heat of the Russian invasion of Ukraine much more intently than we do. They're very happy to spend 5 % and they are doing a lot to try and bolster their defences. We're 1 ,000 plus miles away from the front line. And do we therefore balance welfare, balance healthcare and balance the war? We don't feel it the same way. And I think a lot of our military senior leadership believe we've got to have a public debate. Otherwise, if you don't do that, politicians are never going to support the defence spending we need. Rob, do we know definitively yet whether or not Andy Burnham is willing to spend more on defence?

9:43Spend as much as, well, the man he met privately with the other day, John Healy, the former defence secretary who legged it because the Treasury wouldn't give him the cash. I mean, the only thing I'd say is that he is meeting with a lot of people and a lot of MPs at the moment. I was with one MP last night who was really a rival faction, backing a kind of rival part of the party. And they said that they'd had more from Team Burnham in the last few weeks, more interaction with Andy Burnham and Team Burnham than they'd had interaction with Keir Starmer and Number 10 in the last two years. I think when you look at Andy Burnham on sort of face value, you wouldn't necessarily have a huge amount of confidence that this is the guy that's going to come in and try and slash the welfare budget and apply money into defence instead.

10:24The only kind of counterpoint, the only query I'd have to that is that people are saying, look, you are you're about to have a prime minister who is very political. He is the opposite of Keir Starmer in that respect. He likes telling stories. He likes he's very good at sort of bringing people along, reaching out to people, convincing people, nudging people, influencing people. That is what sort of makes him tick. So I wouldn't be surprised. And I think this is something you'll probably see across lots of different policy areas that you may see Andy Burnham kind of come in, pick up what Keir Starmer has maybe done already, but try and find a better way to talk about it, to storytell around it as well.

11:05But there was one thing that has been briefed out and popped up in a few newspapers that struck me as exactly the type of thing you might see a Prime Minister Andy Burnham do. And this is this idea of war bonds sort of harking back to World War One and World War Two, essentially sort of packaging up debt, getting people to lend you money, be it the public, be it pension funds, be it institutions, but packaging it up as designated investment in the military. you could storytell around that, right? That might get you around this problem of getting more money into defence, while at the same time starting to make people around the country feel that this is a new age that we are living in, that the dangers are higher as well.

11:46Because the government so far hasn't been able to do that. And I think until people sort of feel that we've entered a new age when it comes to the threats we face, the consent may well not be there to cut back on things, to spend more money on defence.

12:09How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

12:49Sean, I mean, it would be at this point in the podcast that I would usually ask you, I mean, if billions are raised through war bonds, where should he be spending it? The problem is, of course, as you've already mentioned, Keir Starmer is off to NATO in just a handful of days, where he will be outlining the defence investment plan, the way in which we spend money as a country to fulfil that strategic defence review of last year. The frustration is that all the conversation has been tweaking with the Leavers. Can I put a little bit less welfare, a little bit more NHS, a little bit less? rather than actually it feels that there's something broken in this country at the moment.

13:26And we seem to have lost our way a little bit. And it's, what's the contract with our government? What do we want the government to do for us? But more importantly, what do we need to do for our government? Because defence isn't something you just outsource to the military. It's a collective responsibility. And I think things like spending more money, it's easy to say, we'll put more money into defence. At the moment, even if you had more money, how would you spend it? And what we should be doing is trying to make defence the foundation of growth for this country. We have a fantastic military capability.

13:54We're one of the very few nations that does warfighting. We have great credibility. The Middle East has always invested in us. Why are we not creating national solutions that work on the export market? We're going to be spending a lot more money in defence globally. That seems to me to present an opportunity. So rather than fiddling with the tactical, turning the dials a little bit, let's have a visionary. Where's the JFK? Where's the person who goes, there's a different future ahead of us. We all need to buy into it. I mean, Rob, is Andy Burnham that man with those eyelashes? Well, I think it does hark back to this idea of him being someone who is a good storyteller.

14:30And I think there is a story to be told, as Sean has outlined there, where you do actually start to talk about defence as part of a kind of broader effort of national renewal almost. So war bonds might be one part of it. Another focus for Andy Burnham, of course, has been talking about re-industrialisation, especially around the north of England, where he was obviously mayor and where he now represents in Makerfield. And you already have the sort of start of a program anyway being pushed by the MOD of essentially trying to use defence spending as an engine for growth. So essentially trying to, you know, kind of strategically use this money, not only to bolster our defences, but also so people on the ground can see the benefit of it and you can feel the economic benefit as a government.

15:18So you would expect him to be pursuing that as well. Well, in his book, he talks more about using green energy and the green tech as the sort of engine of re-industrialisation across the North. I wonder whether he expands that to include defence as well. But isn't there something more fundamental at play here? I mean, Sean, is there anything in Andy Burnham's political journey that makes you think he gets it, that he understands that the defence of the realm is his first priority in Downing Street? Andy is a consummate politician and a storyteller. and at the moment there isn't the public support, the public recognition.

15:56When I go to Ukraine, it's really clear when you talk to people, they don't have that choice anymore. They want to have a welfare state. They want to have an NHS. They want to have freedoms and freedom of speech. None of that is possible if you can't protect yourself. We don't feel that at the moment. Andy Burnham will know, if you were at the start of a premiership, for example, you had five years to run, you'd run an overwhelming majority, you could do all sorts of things, ramp up taxes and actually address this properly, have an absolute furore in the public. But three or four years down the pipe, you could start to give money back.

16:29Call me a cynic, but we've seen this played before. And all of a sudden now, you have actually addressed the real problem at hand. I don't think Andy Burnham's got that luxury this time around. So I think he's a lot more constrained in his options. I think that question you asked, Sean, do we get a sense that he gets it, that he gets the new world that we're living in? And at the moment, it goes back to the very first thing we spoke about on this pod. I think the jury's out because Andy Burnham has very little record, track record to analyse when it comes to this sort of stuff. Maybe over the coming weeks before he inevitably, I think, now moves into number 10, we'll get a better idea.

17:05But I imagine there is some very, very deep thinking going on. And, you know, and I think there'll be plenty of people in Labour and not least in the military establishments as well that will be looking for quite a lot of reassurance from Andy Burnham that, you know, he does understand the breadth and the size of the issue that he's about to take on. I mean, Sean, during your time working in the military, working at the Ministry of Defence, did you ever just get sick of them all? How often did you actively curse your political paymasters? So when you join the military, you pledge to serve your queen then, king now, and country.

17:39But it isn't the king or the queen that sends you off to war. It's your politicians. And so therefore, the whole point of you putting your life on the line, ultimate sacrifice, is all about a greater being, greater vision, greater ethos. And so at the time, you very much admire your politicians because they have a huge way to responsibility. They're going to send you to war, potentially send you to your death and the nation's sons and daughters. The more you serve, the longer you serve, the more you have a closer tie with the politicians. You realise that most of them are career politicians. They clearly just want to get re-elected.

18:11And you become a lot more cynical about their ultimate motives. There can be nothing more important than averting war and all the devastations. We've had two world wars. It was decimating for this country. It's not in our living memory now for most of us. We must avoid that at all costs. at the moment, we're living in a fool's paradise if we believe that we can get by without spending the money. That is a really serious undertaking. Sean, Rob, thanks both very much indeed. And that's your lot for today. Do remember to get in touch with your thoughts. I imagine you've got plenty from the chat with Rob and Sean.

18:45Why at sky.uk is the email. We're back tomorrow. Till then, stay cool. We'll see you soon.

18:58How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. .