Are we in the middle of the Cold War Two or the beginnings of the Third World War? Are we already at war with Russia? The world has certainly become much more unstable and dangerous with the concomitant upending of Britain’s near century-long US-UK security posture.
As we heard week after week from guest lecturers such as Simon Case, Karen Pierce and George Robertson on our new MA government studies module Prime Ministers and National Security, everything feels worse than it did yesterday. And with that comes inescapable pressure to raise defence spending.
The numbers are already creeping up and will continue to do so against the backdrop of a stagnant economy, a huge welfare burden and the rise of inflation due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. But it has to be paid for somehow, sometime. And how much is enough?
When MoD permanent secretary Frank Cooper advised Margaret Thatcher to keep the Treasury off the Falklands war cabinet – because money should not be a consideration – she was able to do so because the operation was clearly going to be limited in nature and there was an overriding need to act forthwith.
Today’s situation is so different, with the almost limitless scale of the challenge and there being no imminent invasion threat to the UK or its dependencies. How to gauge the coming rise will be exercising the attention of the Treasury and the security departments, all overseen by the prime minister who needs to balance everything and give clear direction, never easy at the best of times.
Perhaps the worst of times came in 1900, after reversals for Britain in the Boer War and amid the growing global power of the US and Germany. The PM, Lord Salisbury, launched an astonishing attack on the Treasury, saying it had ‘gradually acquired a position in regard to the defensive departments very different from that which the finance department occupies abroad, and on the whole I think that, for the purpose of national defence, that is not a satisfactory condition… I think the exaggerated control of the Treasury has done harm’.
The chancellor remonstrated, the permanent secretary to the Treasury offered his resignation and a delicious furore ensued. Salisbury was actually a serial denigrator of Treasury power and made clear his disdain when he rejected the traditional title of first lord of the Treasury, assuming the mantle of foreign secretary instead.
There have been so many choice interactions between the Treasury and Defence over the years. A particular favourite came early in the New Labour years when defence became a battleground between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, with the latter often said to prioritise overseas aid. Not wishing to formally engage with the chief of the defence staff – the often-in-full-military-regalia and always-box-office Charles Guthrie – Brown eventually ran into him. ‘You don’t think I understand defence, do you?’ said Brown. ‘No, I bloody well don’t,’ replied the general. (Years later, on hearing I was writing a book on the New Labour governments, Guthrie sought me out at a reception. “I wish to place on the record that I’ve been misquoted,” he said. “Where it’s been reported that I once told Brown ‘I bloody well don’t [think you understand defence]’, what I actually said was ‘I fucking well don’t’.”)
Come the end of the Brown government, following the global financial crisis and the huge deficit that ensued, it was not defence expansion that was on the agenda, but retrenchment. Looking back on his time as Treasury perm sec, Nicholas Macpherson said that in the run-up to the 2010 election, the Treasury had modelled cuts of up to £90bn that involved abolishing the Royal Navy (though he himself would ‘never propose’ such a thing).
The beginnings of what became George Osborne’s austerity programme ruffled feathers, to say the least, right across government and beyond. In fact, as the cuts negotiations got scratchier heading into the winter of 2010, the MoD was said to have resorted to black ops. The hot water that heated much of Whitehall came from their boilers and a fractured water pipe needed attention. In what was described as a ‘process of elimination’, the Treasury’s heating was cut off. As one official observed: ‘The Fast Stream recruitment material never mentioned typing while wearing scarves and fingerless gloves.’
As defence spending rises in priority, the Treasury can be thankful that we have moved into summer. And we can be sure that funding for essential security is never straightforward.
Professor Jon Davis is director of the Strand Group at King’s College London