Nato’s secretary general has said he is confident Andy Burnham will stick to the alliance’s long-term spending commitments, and that the man expected to be the UK’s next prime minister would recognise that rearmament can spur economic growth.
During a visit to London, Mark Rutte said he did not expect the UK to meet an alliance target to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 “in one big step” when its long-delayed defence investment plan was published on Tuesday.
But he said he believed Burnham would see broader value in boosting UK defence spending by nearly £30bn a year, and that “judging from history”, Labour prime ministers had shown “a consistent commitment to Nato”.
Referring to Burnham as Keir Starmer’s likely successor, Rutte said: “I can imagine that the new prime minister will be extremely interested in the issue of economic growth and more jobs.
“Defence spending does two things at the same time. One, your first priority as a government, keep the country safe, obviously number one. But also second [is the] impact of your defence investments. Next to keeping the country safe and strong, is [the fact] it will create jobs.”
A row over the UK’s longer-term defence spending led to the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary earlier this month. He complained that the UK was going too slowly to meet the 3.5% spending target.
He quit partly because Starmer offered to spend only 2.68% by 2030, an increase of £2bn from this year, but leaving little time to grow to 3.5% by 2035, a target the UK signed up to at a Nato summit last year.
On Monday, Rutte tactfully said that he expected the UK would make “a considerable figure and money commitment” in the defence investment plan as “a step on course to get to the 3.5% later”.
The 10-year defence investment plan covers more than £300bn of major projects. After months of wrangling, a funding shortfall of £18bn is thought to have been reduced to less than £4bn, with the new defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, having recently secured an additional £1bn.
The Nato chief spoke to the Guardian in London after a meeting with Starmer, Jarvis and Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, ahead of next week’s Nato summit in Ankara, the capital of Turkey.
Rutte did not have any contact with Burnham, who currently has no formal role in government beyond being a constituency MP. But the message that extra defence spending could stimulate economic growth was in line with comments Burnham made today in Manchester.
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Speaking at the People’s History Museum there, Burnham complained that “UK public procurement policy has been based on chasing cut price deals around the world”, and said that in future “every pound raised from taxpayers will work harder for them, and that approach will apply fully to the defence investment plan”.
Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, said he didn’t think the UK would change its defence policy under Burnham. “I’ve always seen the UK living up to its commitments over the years,” he said.
But he noted that other countries were on a faster track to meet their spending targets. He said Germany would do so “six years ahead of schedule” in 2029, though it too would do so in steps.
The Nato chief also said he thanked Starmer during their final meeting together in Downing Street “for everything that he did”. He said the outgoing prime minister been engaged in “really pushing the rest of Europe and the world to stay very much involved in Ukraine” with military aid and diplomatic support.
