John Healey, who has spectacularly quit as Secretary of State for Defence, was one of Labour’s few good guys: sensible, hostile to the Marxist hard-Left and robust on defence.

He resigned because he refused to defend the indefensible: his party’s shameful, continued run-down of our Armed Forces and, in particular, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ refusal to fund the critical Defence Investment Plan with anything like the sums needed.

As Healey aptly put it, the Government’s approach ‘falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time’.

With Al Carns resigning hours later as Armed Forces minister – stating it was ‘clear the change I had pushed for is not going to come’ – the debate on this issue has been blown wide open. It essentially highlights that the incompetent Reeves and green zealot Ed Miliband are effectively in charge of the British State.

Starmer, now clinging on as Prime Minister by his fingertips, enjoys parroting the phrase ‘country before party’. But in reality, we have scarcely seen a more obvious – and odious – case of a man putting party and himself before country.

The Defence Investment Plan needed £28billion merely to fulfil current commitments. Yet the Ministry of Defence is likely to receive a mere £18billion, perhaps as little as £15billion. This is not ‘investment’ – it is cuts. And the reason for this is obvious: the Government’s insatiable addiction to welfare spending.

Healey aside, Labour has put Benefits Street before the defence of the realm. Our Armed Forces are being under-equipped so that a bloated welfare system and Labour’s other dubious fixations can be prioritised.

The burgeoning welfare bill, in particular, should surprise no one. Infamously, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden – a man with the aura of a depressed undertaker – told Labour’s disgraced uber-grandee ‘Lord’ Mandelson not long ago: ‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?”’ 

That question, which should haunt this Government to its ignominious end, shows the true attitude of these socialist ne’er-do-wells.

The breathtaking annual expenditure on pensions and benefits, at £333.7billion, larger than Britain’s entire income-tax take, at £329billion. One can argue the merits of the pensions ‘triple lock’ – pensioners, at least, have paid into the system – but what is undoubtedly indefensible is paying billions to foreign migrants, or to healthy Britons who choose to live on benefits rather than work.

Our nation once saw idleness as a form of moral and economic squalor. It still is, but instead of taming it, our leaders are turbo-charging it. Yet it’s not just welfare. We commit tens of billions – here and abroad – to Net Zero, the eccentric obsession of a few quasi-religious green obsessives, led by that high priest of eco-madness, Miliband.

He is refusing to find savings in his own generously funded department to support defence.

Foreign aid remains another unmitigated disaster. Just last week, as the Daily Mail reported, a jaw-dropping leaked report revealed how £28billion of foreign aid and Covid loans was illegally appropriated, including to foreign terror groups. 

That figure is coincidentally the same amount that the Defence Investment Plan would have needed to meet current requirements. The report, which was commissioned and produced by the Cabinet Office in 2023, was buried by – I’m afraid – the last Tory government.

My party lost the subsequent election – but was anyone in the Civil Service sacked for this mass funding of our enemies? I think we know the answer. 

Thanks to this Government and, to be fair, its profligate predecessors, merely servicing existing debt now costs Britain around £110billion per year – roughly the same as education and defence combined. Scottish economist Adam Smith once said: ‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.’ We seem intent on proving it.

Some compare our increasingly unstable era with the 1930s: ‘the gathering storm’, in Churchill’s phrase. In fact, our predicament is worse. Large-scale rearmament in Britain started in 1935 and the budget leapt from 2.2 per cent to 6.9 per cent by 1938 – and this during a period where producing armaments was easier and quicker, and when we still boasted a mighty industrial base.

The Hawker Hurricane fighter took 6,000 man-hours to build – a few weeks at most. By contrast, a Eurofighter takes two years.

Let’s hope our enemies are happy to wait for us to re-arm.

Well-informed people in the Baltics and Finland tell me they have reason to believe that Vladimir Putin, to distract from his failure in Ukraine, may turn his attention to their countries next.

The dictator can see Nato’s military unpreparedness, the shakiness of its alliance and the weakness of its political leaders. If he believes he can break Article 5, Nato’s self-defence clause, using guile and a mixture of political and military methods, he will undoubtedly try.

All hyperbole aside, Britain’s Armed Forces have been one of our greatest institutions – aligning professionalism and skill with courage and integrity. 

Our ability to defeat foreign tyrants, and build the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, came from mastering organised violence, under a professional officer class. The Left might hate that fact today, but much of our lasting prosperity and such strength as we retain stems directly from it.

However, it’s true our defence policy has been dysfunctional for decades – particularly since the end of the Cold War and especially regarding procurement. Put simply, we waste far too much money on the wrong things.

When the Defence Investment Plan is finally published, I fully expect a large chunk of it to go on the new Tempest jet. But this manned aircraft is likely to be obsolete even before it comes into service in 15 years’ time. By contrast, Germany’s Helsing, a five-year-old, multi-billion-pound start-up, unveiled its first unmanned fighter this week.

The Ajax armoured vehicle, which required 1,200 ‘unique capability requirements’, is another such scandal. Instead of accepting a solution that is 80 or 90 per cent there and delivered on time and on budget, the Ministry has an ignoble history of demanding complex, customised demands that result in kit delivered years late and over budget. The perfect is always the enemy of the good.

So, even with brave soldiers, sailors and airmen and women, I worry about our ability to defend ourselves thanks to Labour’s disgraceful failure to invest in defence. Perhaps it is best to hope that, for the first time in decades, there will now be votes in defence and foreign affairs.

The mass of silent, sensible Britons will surely look aghast at politicians throwing money at the wilfully idle and on fixations such as Net Zero – and make their views known at the ballot box.

Two Labour figures have had the integrity to stand up and say: ‘No more.’ I fear their colleagues’ abject failure to do the same will haunt our nation in the years ahead.

• Dr Bob Seely MBE is the author of The New Total War. He was a former Member of Parliament and served as a British soldier on the Iraq, Afghan, Libya and ISIS campaigns.
• A previous version of this article said that welfare payments had exceeded income tax revenue for the first time. In fact, this has been the case for several years. The article has been amended to make this clear.