Tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, have been wasted by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on weapons projects that have been repeatedly delayed or abandoned, were ill-conceived from the start or will soon be irrelevant to modern warfare. The government’s recent Strategic Defence Review promises that many more billions – which could otherwise be spent on vital public services and civil infrastructure – will be wasted. 

The Starmer government is refusing to learn from the past. It wants to increase military spending by £20 billion a year by the end of the decade, with the Prime Minister claiming increased spending on arms will provide a much-needed ‘boost’ to Britain’s growth, output and employment. The evidence suggests otherwise. 

Arms sales make up just 0.004 per cent of Treasury revenue and the arms industry accounts for just one per cent of Britain’s economic output. The government’s own figures show that its new ‘strategic partnership’ with US IT data-mining giant Palantir (co-founded by Peter Thiel, a right-wing tech investor close to the Trump administration) will create just 350 jobs from a £1.5 billion spend.

Claims about arms companies’ contribution to the economy – and to Britain’s ‘national security’ – are a hugely exaggerated ‘myth’, confirmed by the recently published Alternative Defence Review.

The military-industrial lobby

Most members of parliament however continue to defer to a military-industrial lobby that operates without any effective independent scrutiny. That lobby is bolstered by the ‘special relationship’ between senior defence and military officials and leading arms companies. 

The ‘revolving door syndrome’ is more accurately a one-way corridor from Whitehall to private companies. As many as 40 per cent of senior military and MoD personnel have taken on executive roles in arms and private security companies after leaving government employment. In one recent example, a former deputy chief of the defence staff was appointed UK director of the major Israeli arms company, Elbit. 

The National Audit Office (NAO), parliament’s financial watchdog, repeatedly points to mismanagement and profligacy by defence officials, military chiefs, and arms companies. Their persistent and damning criticisms of MoD procurement strategy have been routinely ignored, with the military establishment encouraged to assume it can continue to pour money into military projects that are wholly inappropriate.

Even the Treasury, so keen to target welfare, has turned a blind eye to military extravagance – fearful perhaps, like MPs, of being accused of damaging ‘national security’. That concept is deployed by ministers and Whitehall officials (often described as the ‘permanent government’) whenever they have no concrete or credible argument to support their claims.

Protected contracts

In 2023, the NAO identified a £16.9 billion ‘black hole’ in Britain’s defence equipment programme. In 2024, for the second successive year, the MoD did not publish an annual report on the state of the programme. Consequently, the NAO has not been able assess the government’s defence procurement plans. 

In January 2025, the chairs of the Commons Defence and Public Accounts Committees wrote to the MoD’s most senior official expressing their ‘deep frustration’ at an ‘unacceptable loss of transparency… severely undermining the ability of both committees to scrutinise the estimated £300bn of taxpayers’ money to be spent on defence equipment over the next decade’.

Private contractors which receive public investment in military procurement programmes are the beneficiaries of such protected practices. In 2023/24, 44 per cent of MoD contracts were non-competitive, consuming £16.4 billion of public investment. The ‘security’ provided by these contracts, as well as direct subsidies for research and design, is to arms companies and their shareholders benefiting from higher profits.

Examples of egregious waste and incompetence which have cost taxpayers tens of billions are well documented. More recent ones include:

Muddled missions

When Starmer unveiled the government’s Strategic Defence Review in June, he emphasised that Britain would pursue a ‘Nato first’ policy. At the very same time, the HMS Prince of Wales was voyaging to the Far East — very much not a Nato area. The navy says the carriers’ role is to ‘fly the flag’ and demonstrate Britain’s global interests. Much more effective global influence-boosting instruments — foreign aid, the BBC World Service and the British Council — are facing sweeping budget cuts.

Starmer has also agreed to expand the British-based nuclear arsenal by buying a squadron of F35 bombers capable of delivering US tactical nuclear warheads. The purchase is very likely a breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to which Britain is a signatory. 

According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Britain spends a larger portion of its military budget on nuclear weapons than any other state. Its annual nuclear weapons spending has more than doubled since 2012. Following the latest long-term plan, it will increase a further 62 per cent, to nearly £100 billion by 2033.

Making a mockery of defence

While the government spends more and more on expensive long-range weapons systems, independent analysts warn that Britain’s home defences are vulnerable to attack by hostile forces, making further mockery of Starmer’s ambition to make Britain a ‘battle-ready armour-clad nation’.

Over a decade ago, I asked a senior defence official what threats the government was ignoring. ‘Cyber’ was his one-word response. As long ago as 2018, the MoD published a report titled ‘Global Strategic Trends – The Future Starts Today’. It identified emerging threats to national security, including climate change, terrorism, and hybrid warfare (cyber-attacks, biological warfare, drones, lasers). The report was ignored by senior defence officials and defence ministers alike.

Only now, very belatedly, is the government starting to face up to these ‘non-conventional’ threats, including cyber-attacks, sabotage (including to deep-sea communications cables) and drones — cheap weapons that have been used so effectively and extensively in the Ukraine-Russia war. 

Starmer and the arms lobby must not be allowed to continue pouring a fortune into weapons systems, and especially not ones completely unsuited to modern conflicts and threats. With public services and benefits systems facing huge cuts, it must supply people in Britain with what they really need: welfare, not warfare.

Billions of pounds are being channelled to private arms companies and their shareholders that under this Labour government will be rewarded with greater and greater profits and bonuses. MPs and trade unions, charities and progressive pressure groups, must campaign against such egregious waste of public money. Diverting resources back into public investments and vital social needs would contribute so much more to Britain’s true ‘national security’.