UK defence budget increase - Discussion thread

Recently Starmer announced a massive increase to the defence budget, the biggest in many decades. The defence budget is due to increase to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and 3% by 2030. Part of the increase is due to be funded by cuts to international aid programs, which will be slashed by ~40% from 0.5% to 0.3%. It's the top thread on all the UK subreddits at the moment and the discourse is certainly very uniform and one sided, no matter what part of the political spectrum you're on.

The top comment on the r/ukpolitics su thread suggests that a £13,400,000,000 increase is "an improvment", but that it "could be better". All of the replies agree that a collosal increase in defence is more than warranted, but they only wish the increase could be much larger than £13,400,000,000 and that the timeline for transitioning to this increased budget could be even quicker and more aggressive.

r/unitedkingdom agrees, with the top comment stating a very succinct "it's the right decision". The 2nd highest comment adds to this saying that cutting international aid by 40% is also an astute move and that "swapping soft power for hard power is the only logical choice".

Even on this subreddit, which is chocked full of socialists, the discourse is also remarkably uniformly and enthusiastic about the plans. With the top comments saying that it "needed to happen" and that it is "100% the correct decision". Several other highly upvoted comments add that the rise "may not be enough".

The world is undoubtedly becoming more unstable. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the threat of climate change and the rise of the far right in the west are all parts of that.

But, even still, I find the way people are talking about the defence budget on here kind of strange. I understand people feeling threatened by Trump's disintrest in standing up for Ukraine, but are modern socialists really all defence hawks these days?

So much of the discussion just seems "vibes" based. People are confidently plucking 2.5%, 3%, 5% GDP numbers out of their heads, but if you asked them to articulate the actual, material differences that would occur based on those numbers, I doubt they could tell you. Apparently slashing international aid is sensible too, but if you asked someone saying that if the knew what aid programs were being cut, they probably also couldn't tell you.

When discussing defence the conclusion is nearly always that money is no object and that we should compromise whatever is needed to reach an arbitrary target (3% by 2030 in this case). But why not apply that same attitude to healthcare access or hospital wait times or welfare? I would propse that the average Britain is much more likely to be impacted by insufficient healthcare or welfare provisions, than by an invasion from a foreign country.

Diverting money away from social services and towards defence has it's own security threats too. It's a large reason the far right, who are able to scapegoat immigrants as the cause for basically all societal woes, have been able to gain so much of a foothold in Europe. And they bring a lot of dangerous policies with them and generally make the world a more dangerous place.

The international aid programs being cut as part of this package probably also save many lives overseas.

I guess I'm just surprised at how uniform the discussion is on here, and the near unanimous agreement that cutting international aid and drastically increasing the military budget is the best call. Especially as this is a left wing subreddit. I don't pretend to understand everything here, but removing soft power institutions like USAID and expanding lethal military assets is exactly what Trump is doing in the US, and I'm worried about the direction that could bring us. The UK has participated in a lot of global destabilising itself over the recent years. Iraq/Afghanistan wars and tacit support of Israel's occupation of Palestine are part of that. It could be more useful to advocate for changing that side of our foreign policy if a stable world is the priority