The Old Guard Fife and Drums from the U.S. Army Band march past Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer during the Beating Retreat military ceremony on the East Lawn at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on September 17, 2025, during the U.S. president’s second State Visit.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP
Officials don’t know where money is coming from to fix defence gaps. It likely won’t come at all.
The UK has been talking up its potential role in contributing to a European ‘peacekeeping’ force in Ukraine for about a year. But just as the British Army lacked the means to provide any serious amount of support when Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer began his grandstanding then, it remains far from ready now.
A report in the Telegraph over the weekend said that the country’s deterrent nuclear submarine fleet is “no longer fit for purpose,” pointing to broader frailty in Britain’s defence capabilities.
The paper quoted a former director of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence as saying that “performance across all aspects of the programme continues to get worse in every dimension.”
This is an unprecedented situation in the nuclear submarine age. It is a catastrophic failure of succession and leadership planning.
Shadow Lord Chancellor Robert Jenrick also described this as “a basic failure of the British state’s duty to protect the nation”—not that his ‘Conservative’ Party’s own record on defence is anything to boast about. He was, however, still right to highlight on Sunday that this weakness “should be one of the defining issues in Westminster.”
All too often our politics obsesses about trivia and ignores the serious and compounding challenges we face.
The situation is not helped by the fact there are doubts about the Labour government’s wider defence improvement plans, thanks to inevitable spending gaps. Bloomberg highlighted on Monday that six months after ministers laid out a major defence review, there remains “little clarity beyond 2027 on where the money will come from,” and that “military chiefs are increasingly concerned the government will need to scale back its ambitions.”
Politico also said last week that “anxiety is rising” inside Whitehall—the home of the British government—about “how the UK will match lofty rhetoric with reality.”
Britain’s other main partner in the so-called ‘coalition of the willing,’ France, looks no more prepared to send forces to Ukraine, and neither does much of the rest of Europe. Kyiv, it appears, is better off relying on Washington to bring about peace, and ensure that it stays.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
