It’s time for Burnham to rethink Labour’s foreign policy – Carol Turner

“Europe is rushing headlong into war, and the Labour government has been leading the charge. That has to change.”

By Carol Turner

Andy Burnham’s Makerfield victory demonstrated that the rise of Reform and the far right doesn’t have to be inevitable. It gave a lot of people room to hope that a Labour government under a new leader might return to the traditional values they associate with the Party.

Burnham’s poll rating makes him one of the most popular politicians in the UK today, though the bar remains depressingly low. Around a third of the public have a favourable view of Burnham. He is popular with a majority of 2024 Labour voters, and Greens and LibDem voters rate him positively. That said, these ratings could be the highest he experiences during his premiership if Labour 2.0 doesn’t deliver.

Managing the economy in the interests of the majority, rather than prioritising big business, tops the list of what the public wants from a Burnham government – and that really does need a serious change of direction. It means putting money back in the pockets of all of us suffering from a cost of living crisis that keeps on keeping on, even as we’re told Britain’s economic indicators are looking up.

The new Prime Minister enters Downing Street with the overwhelming backing of the Parliamentary Labour Party but with significant policy differences on the Labour benches that are unresolved. The announcement of his Cabinet and ministerial teams will be pored over for early signs of what to expect. Isolated concessions and U-turns won’t cut it. Failure is not an option if Labour is to survive at the next election.

It’s foreign policy, stupid

International politics are defined by escalating tensions – in Europe, Latin America, the Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. The international economy is already disrupted by the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. A world economic recession is looming as President Trump’s on-again, off-again war on Iran drags on.

Global inflation is expected to rise in 2026. Global growth is projected at 3.1% in 2026 and 3.2% in 2027 – below recent outcomes, and well under pre-pandemic averages. These aren’t Labour CND’s predictions; this is the forecast of the IMF in the April 2026 edition of World Economic Outlook, Global Economy in the Shadow of War.

In today’s world, no British prime minister’s domestic agenda can be separated from his foreign policy options. The same elephant in the Cabinet Room that confronted his predecessor awaits Andy Burnham – Britain’s burgeoning military spending. Europe is rushing headlong into war, and the Labour government has been leading the charge. That has to change.

Politicians have to stop asking how quickly the UK can accumulate the accoutrements of war, and start asking what they can do to stop it. In a wide-ranging discussion about the Nato Summit for a Labour CND podcast I hosted recently, Kate Hudson and I talk about the shockingly casual disregard for the lives of thousands upon thousands of troops and civilians such an approach represents.

Freeing up money for change

On top of the huge increases in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget that Labour and Tory governments alike have committed to, Keir Starmer’s parting gift to the successor who swept him from office was the Defence Industrial Plan (DIP) published in time for Starmer’s last hurrah at the Nato Summit in Ankara. Not only does it reduce other government departments’ budgets further, it still leaves Burnham with an unfunded spending deficit approaching £5 billion that this year’s autumn budget statement will need to address.

The DIP sets out the MoD’s spending and equipment priorities for the next 10 years, but Starmer’s announcement only includes detailed spending plans to 2029. It commits to an extra £298bn for the MoD on top of the increases already made in the 2025 Spending Review – £62.2 billion in the year just gone, rising to £73.5bn annually by 2028-29.

To cover part of the additional cost of the DIP commitment, the Treasury will skim 1% annually off every other government department’s capital budget starting with this year’s capital allocations. Investment in housing, transport, education and more will be trimmed down to fund investment in Europe’s war drive. On top of that, the capital budgets of the Departments of Transport and Energy Security & Net Zero will be cut further, £800 million and £2 billion respectively over the course of four years to 2029. This still leaves Burnham with an unfunded black hole of almost £5bn to plug by the time the next budget is announced in the autumn.

The DIP consolidates Britain as one of Europe’s leading military spenders. DIP includes such big-ticket items as:

• a ring-fenced £63bn for the Royal Navy’s Trident nuclear weapons system – the continued upkeep of the Vanguard class nuclear submarines currently on 24/7 patrol, funding for the Dreadnought class replacements, and a new nuclear warhead
• confirmation that the government will purchase the 12 F-35A nuclear-capable jets from the US, to expand Britain’s role in Nato’s nuclear mission
• building up to 12 SSN-AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, double the number currently planned as part of the trilateral security agreement in the Indo-Pacific between Australia, the UK, and US, and
• conformation of GCAP, the Global Combat Air Programme, an Italian-led initiative with the  UK and Japan. to develop a new generation of stealth fighter jets which will be at the heart of the RAF’s war-fighting capability.

CND has condemned DIP, calling for genuine security, not a new arms race. General Secretary, Sophie Bolt, described the plan as reckless: ‘These are political choices, and they are the wrong ones.’ The DIP isn’t the first or only wrong spending choice British governments have made when it comes to the MoD budget.

Time for Labour to rethink

Britain was the 6^th highest military spender in the world in 2025, according to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, allocating $89bn between 2.3-2.4% of GDP. IISS, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, gave Britain the same ranking, after the US, China, Russia, Germany, and India. The UK dropped down from 5^th place in 2024, largely the result of an exponential increase in German military spending as Chancellor Mertz positions his government for a leading military role in a rearmed Europe. German military spending rose by 24% in 2025.

Eighteen of Nato’s 38 members currently meet Alliance spending targets. Britain, however, is one of only two Nato members to have met the target every single year since Nato first introduced targets in 2006. The other is the US. We have been punching above our weight for 20 years.

The 2026 Nato Summit consolidated Trump’s attempts to drive military spending up, shifting more of Nato’s financial burden onto European members and Canada and freeing up the US to focus on China and the Indo-Pacific. Speaking in Ankara, Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte described Europe’s increased contribution to Nato as ‘inspiring’. ‘I expect this summit to be a landmark in the history of our Alliance.’

In addition to the annual figures compiled by established sources like SIPRI and IISS, some other well-hidden stats, mentioned below, have emerged about Britain’s military spending in recent research.

Jobs, what jobs?

When it comes to sugar-coating military spending increases, governments of all persuasions fall back on the claim that arms manufacturing is a jobs generator. Successive governments have clung to this myth, including Labour under Tony Blair. Starmer repeated it as he pushed up Britain’s military spending. Just as arms spending does not contribute to a productive economy, however, neither does it lead to increased employment. A variety of studies over the last two decades make this clear – by the Scottish TUC, CND, Campaign Against Arms Trade to name just a few.

Unfortunately, this time round trade unions such as Unite and the GMB have gone along with Starmer’s claims. The TUC got set to help break the vicious circle when delegates to the 2025 Congress passed a motion breaking with several years of backing military spending.

The arms industry is a relatively small economic sector in employment terms. Research shows investing in armaments creates fewer jobs than the equivalent invested in sectors such as education or healthcare. According to CAAT, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, for example, the UK defence sector supports roughly 1 in every 60 jobs – trailing behind retail, hospitality, and public services.

A new report from the Just Transition Project suggests the DIP is likely to create unemployment. It says Starmer’s so-called defence dividend will not materialise, estimating:

• the £15 billion in additional military spending in DIP will lead to around 10,000 net jobs lost in the UK.
• if proportional cuts are used in the same way to fund the £4.7 billion unaddressed shortfall in DIP funding, these job losses could more than double.

Labour 2.0 must break with the jobs myth and investigate what the impact of Britain’s rising military spending really is.

The cost of nuclear

The period 2022-25 saw a rapid increase in nuclear weapons spending by the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, with little if any democratic oversight or public scrutiny. Their combined total spend amounted to almost half a trillion dollars, $471 billion, in that period. It rose by 19% in 2025 according to a report by ICAN, the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, which lobbies for the adoption of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The US led the pack, as it has for almost 50 years, spending more than the other eight nuclear states combined. Congress devoted $69.2bn to American nuclear weapons programmes last year. The ICAN report includes a number of little-remarked facts about Britain’s nuclear spending in 2025 too, including:

• the UK overtook Russia to become the third highest nuclear weapons spender after the US and China, and
• UK nuclear weapons spending accounted for around 14% of the MoD’s budget.

Given the expansion of Britain’s nuclear weapons capabilities, and the long-term nature of nuclear weapons programmes, our nuclear spending is set to keep rising for the foreseeable future unless the government is willing to rethink UK nuclear expansion.

The change Labour must make

The impact of military spending decisions is not confined purely to the financial and consequential social costs to Labour’s domestic agenda, important though that is. They carry even bigger penalties – the growing likelihood of an apocalyptic war fought on our doorstep, and the prospect of nuclear confrontation.

Speaking at an emergency meeting on the invasion of Venezuela at the UN Security Council in January, Jeffrey Sachs reminded us all of what’s at stake. The world survived two world wars in the 20^th century, he said; there would be no third chance in the 21^st. Now we’re in the nuclear age; humanity would perish in a worldwide war. As Kate Hudson put it in Labour CND’s podcast, it’s just incomprehensible that taxpayers’ money is being squandered on making weapons of mass destruction.

Conflict resolution and diplomacy – the essence of which is talking to people you don’t agree with – is a part of Labour’s traditional values too. Russia and the US between them possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. Andy Burnham should be urging negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and pressing Russia and the US to negotiate a replacement for the New START Treaty, which expired in February, to limit their nuclear arsenals.

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• Carol Turner is a Vice Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Convenor of CND’s International Advisory Group. You can follow her on Twitter/X.
• The podcast on Nato’s 2026 Summit with Kate Hudson is available at the end of this week on Labour CND’s YouTube channel.
• For a review of ICAN’s report, see Carol Turner, The terrifying cost of the new nuclear arms race, Morning Star, 20 June 2026.
• If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.