The new National Security Strategy: joining the dots or sleight of hand?

A broad definition of "national security" can show sophisticated policy-making or offer a way to cook the books when it comes to public expenditure: which is this?

Perhaps someone once told Sir Keir Starmer that you present a more difficult target to hit if you keep moving. Hold that thought.

The National Security Strategy 2025

At some point before NATO’s annual summit in The Hague on 24/25 June—in other words, next week—the government has assured its audience that it will publish a new National Security Strategy. The existence of this document was announced by the Prime Minister on 25 February (the statement leaked, Starmer denied responsibility and promised an inquiry), and couched in terms of breadth of vision and a comprehensive overview:

As the strategic defence review is well under way, and across Government we are conducting a number of other reviews relevant to national security, it is obvious that those reviews must pull together. So before the NATO summit in June we will publish a single national security strategy and bring it to this House, because, as I said earlier, that is how we must meet the threats of our age: together and with strength—a new approach to defence, a revival of our industrial base, a deepening of our alliances; the instruments of our national power brought together; creating opportunity, assuring our allies and delivering security for our country.

The Prime Minister noted in his statement that the Strategic Defence Review was “well under way”: indeed, we now know that the reviewers submitted their final version of the SDR on 10 March, so a fortnight after the Prime Minister’s statement. Also active that that stage was the government’s “audit” of the United Kingdom’s relations with China, promised in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto, conducted on a cross-Whitehall basis under the leadership of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and still to be published; last December it was “due to conclude in early 2025 and we will update Parliament once the audit has concluded”.

The government had also begun work on its Defence Industrial Strategy, publishing a “statement of intent” in December 2024. The strategy itself has still not been completed (so far as we know) or published. In addition, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, had in September commissioned three reviews, on the FCDO’s global impact, economic diplomacy and development policy, and the results of these had been submitted to him but not made public when the Prime Minister announced the National Security Strategy on 25 February.

There are two defensible approaches to this. The first and more logical one is that a national security strategy is drafted and published first, setting the scene of national security in the broadest possible context and defining the United Kingdom’s place in the world and its interests. From that can cascade a number of more specific pieces of policy in discrete areas like defence, diplomacy, trade and development, all developed within a coherent framework. The government did not do that.

The second approach, which I think is intellectually defensible but less helpful and coherent than the first, is to use a national security strategy to draw together all of the (very many) reviews which the new government undertook. It then becomes a summation of all the different strands of work, but is inevitably a reactive document rather than one which informs the others. This was what Sir Keir Starmer indicated when he talked of “pulling together” other reviews. But the government did not do that either.

Unless the National Security Strategy is delayed beyond its promised publication, it will be able to reflect the Strategic Defence Review and the FCDO’s internal reviews, but it will not take account of the Defence Industrial Strategy or the China audit, at the very least. (In fact, as I argued in City A.M. in January, the China audit is largely pointless, as we can judge from the government’s actions what stance it takes in its relationship with China.) It is hard to discern any joined-up plan behind the timing of any of these reviews, or see how they can possibly be expected to hang together as coherent policy documents.

The new National Security Strategy is being developed by two men: Jonathan Powell, the UK’s National Security Adviser, and Professor John Bew, the historian who was Downing Street foreign policy adviser to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and (briefly) Sir Keir Starmer. Bew was the guiding hand behind 2021’s Global Britain in a competitive age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy and its successor, The Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a more contested and volatile world. These were both hefty, considered policy documents which attempted to look at national security in a broad sense, not merely the hard power of defence and the soft power of diplomacy, and Bew has considerable experience in working across government departments to try to create a holistic approach.

Developing “national security” and National Security Strategies

The phrase “national security” is not new, though it is not as old as the broad sweep of responsibilities it has come to describe. (I will write an essay eventually about the history of the phrase and the idea.) One of the earliest uses of the phrase was by then-Democratic vice-presidential nominee Senator Harry Truman in an August 1944 article in Collier’s Weekly, in which he advocated that the different branches of the armed forces be brought together in “a complete integration that will consider the national security as a whole”. As President, Truman brought the idea into the mainstream with the National Security Act of 1947, the stated purpose of which was:

To promote the national security by providing for a Secretary of Defense; for a National Military Establishment; for a Department of the Army, a Department of the Navy, and a Department of the Air Force; and for the coordination of the activities of the National Military Establishment with other departments and agencies of the Government concerned with the national security.

The act created the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while the National Military Establishment would within two years absorb the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force into the Department of Defense we know today.

Nevertheless, that development—essentially a melding of foreign policy and defence which had been happening for decades before even 1947—set the scene for “national security” for the rest of the 20th century. It was sufficiently well accepted that when the mercurial writer Henry Fairlie raged in The Atlantic in January 1975 about the increasing dominance of jargon in public debate, one of his targets was “national security”. Claiming that even the Department of Defense could not adequately or specifically define the phrase, he was pitiless and excoriating.

One can give a meaning to “national defense”; one can give no meaning to “national security,” with the result that one can give any meaning to it that one likes. Yet the phrase lies, not only in the speeches of politicians and the editorials of journalists, but in laws of Congress and in the judgments of courts. This is the kind of clearing up that the language of politics now requires.

This new, post-Second World War coinage was still not a full conflation: the United Kingdom continued to produce “defence reviews” which dealt wholly or primarily with military capabilities and strategy, in 1957, 1966, 1968, 1974, 1981, 1990, 1994 and 1998, that last being the Strategic Defence Review overseen by then-Defence Secretary Lord Robertson of Port Ellen; he was the lead reviewer for the Strategic Defence Review published this month.

Gordon Brown, less than a month into his long-craved premiership, made a statement in the House of Commons in July 2007 which, in retrospect, represented a significant weight of change in the government’s approach to “national security”. He announced the establishment of a National Security Strategy, the first iteration of which would be “published and presented in the autumn to Parliament for debate and decision in this House”; there would be a single security budget; and he linked the armed forces, counter-terrorism, policing, border control, immigration, transport security and critical national infrastructure as part of a single policy area of “national security”.

As part of the implementation of this, Brown created a cabinet committee called the Ministerial Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development (NSID), which he chaired, and it grew rapidly to have nine sub-committees by late 2009. Their titles give a flavour of the extent of Brown’s vision for national security: Overseas Defence, Tackling Extremism, Intelligence, Nuclear Security, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Africa, Trade, Protective Security & Resilience and Europe. He also established a National Security Forum, the role and membership of which he announced to Parliament in March 2009.

The purpose of the Forum is to harness a wide range of expertise and experience from outside Government to provide independent advice on a wide variety of national security issues to the Government and the Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development (NSID). It will have an important role in contributing to the annual updates of the National Security Strategy, the first of which shall be published before the summer recess.

The first National Security Strategy, Security in an interdependent world, was published in March 2008. It was not a perfect document, but it was ambitious and intellectually sophisticated: it acknowledged its breadth, stating that the government’s “single overarching national security objective” was:

protecting the United Kingdom and its interests, enabling its people to go about their daily lives freely and with confidence, in a more secure, stable, just and prosperous world.

Logically and clearly, it began with the principles of the government’s approach; set out an assessment of major global security challenges and “drivers of insecurity”; proposed the UK’s responses to these; and explained how the strategy would be “taken forward” across government.

Dr Tobias Feakin, reviewing the strategy for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), argued that it was necessary to look behind the NSS’s initial, seemingly over-broad scope to what underpinned it.

Once viewed as the genesis of pan-governmental, joined-up thinking on security, it becomes a more valuable piece of documentation. For government, this document provides a basis upon which it can centre its thinking and actions to the security dilemmas of the day. For the public, the NSS is a window into the multi-layered security issues that government is considering, as well as the mechanisms that government has put in place to address these threats… The NSS marks a useful progression in the Government’s approach to security. It lays the foundations for a more informed decision-making process within government, which if guided properly could lead to increasingly reasoned and effective security decisions being made.

The NSS was updated in June 2009 in Security for the Next Generation, and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government issued a new National Security Strategy in October 2010, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty. In 2011 and 2012, the government presented reports on the NSS to Parliament, but there was then a hiatus until November 2015, when the newly elected Conservative government combined two strands of work and published The National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015: A Secure and Prosperous United Kingdom. An annual report on this was delivered in 2016, but the next update did not appear until March 2018 and was folded into a new document, the National Security Capability Review.

Leaving the NSS behind

A report later in 2018 by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy was critical of the National Security Capability Review and the separation of defence under the Modernising Defence Programme.

The decision to focus on capabilities does not do justice to the changes to the wider security environment. The NSCR’s ‘cost-neutral’ basis was also ill-advised, given the significant deficit in the defence budget and the intensifying threat picture. The Government’s subsequent launch of the Modernising Defence Programme (MDP) in January, to continue the NSCR’s work on defence on a different basis and timeline from the rest of the review, suggests that the NSCR has inadvertently become an uncomfortable ‘halfway house’ between a ‘quick refresh’ of national security capabilities and a full review… [it] also risks undermining the review’s purpose. It raises questions about the extent to which defence and security can be integrated in setting, funding and delivering national security strategy—an ambition of Governments for the past decade or so.

The Modernising Defence Programme had been set out to Parliament in January 2018 by the Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson. The results of the process were then published in December that year.

When the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy returned to the subject, as it had promised, in July 2019, the conclusions of its report were damning.

The Government has become accustomed to talking a better game than it plays on national security… National security strategy-making is about making choices, and the Government must now steel itself to make the difficult choices that it has sidestepped for too long… The NSCR and Modernising Defence Programme (MDP) processes have shown that the funding model for defence is broken: the Treasury persists in not funding the Government’s defence ambitions properly, while the MoD has repeatedly struggled to manage its budget efficiently and effectively… The new Prime Minister [Boris Johnson] must immediately set about addressing policy and budgetary decisions that have been left hanging by the NSCR and especially by the MDP.

By this stage, the National Security Strategy had lost the rigour, clarity and regularity with which it had it been established a decade before, and it effectively fell by the wayside when Boris Johnson appointed John Bew to work on what would become the Integrated Review.

Interlude: Sir Keir Starmer’s National Security Adviser

At this point it is worth summarising briefly events which took place in the second half of 2024 as they relate to the new National Security Strategy. One of David Cameron’s wisest and most enduring innovations when he became Prime Minister in May 2010 was to establish a National Security Council and the position of National Security Adviser to serve as its secretary and as his principal official on related issues. The first National Security Adviser was former Permanent Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Sir Peter Ricketts (now Lord Ricketts), who agreed to serve only for a short transitional period; four of his six successors have been senior members of the Diplomatic Service.

In April 2024, Rishi Sunak announced that the next National Security Adviser would be drawn from the armed forces, General Gwyn Jenkins, then serving as Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. He would replace Sir Tim Barrow some time in the summer of that year and it was widely expected that Barrow would become British Ambassador to the United States. The Opposition complained that it was improper to make these appointments in the months before a general election (a wholly groundless case in terms of propriety and precedent, as I explained at the time), because a new government would be entitled to make its own appointments (as indeed it is, but that does not extend to an entitlement to have roles left vacant in the meantime to make matters more convenient for an incoming administration).

Less than two months after taking office, Sir Keir Starmer cancelled Jenkins’s appointment, for reasons which were never clearly articulated. He also said there would be an “open and transparent process” under which the recruitment of a National Security Adviser would be re-run, and government sources suggested Jenkins would be entitled to apply again, though no-one seriously thought that was a likely scenario. In the end, there is no sign that such a competition was held. In early November, a few months after Jenkins had been “un-appointed”, Jonathan Powell was named as National Security Adviser, though he was and is employed a specialist adviser rather than a civil servant, as all his predecessors have been, which imposes limits upon his direct authority.

Powell was Sir Tony Blair’s long-serving Chief of Staff, first as Leader of the Opposition (1995-97) and then in Downing Street (1997-2007), along with Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown the only person to have retained the same office all the way through Blair’s decade-long premiership. He had previously worked in the Diplomatic Service from 1979 to 1995, and during his time as Downing Street Chief of Staff had been involved deeply in some aspects of national security, especially with regard to Northern Ireland and the Belfast Agreement concluded in 1998, and was seen by many as being at the heart of Blair’s foreign policy.

Powell’s appointment was significant in two particular ways. First, it has transformed the role of National Security Adviser in ways we may not yet be able fully anticipate by reframing it as a more political “SpAd” role, with few management or administrative responsibilities. The Cabinet Office is also currently attempting to use Powell’s special adviser status to argue, again without any real foundation, that he should not be expected to appear as a witness in front of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. As I argued recently in a piece for the British Foreign Policy Group, this stance by the Cabinet Office does not hold up even to the slightest pressure.

The second factor is that the Prime Minister spent his first five months in office effectively without a National Security Adviser—Sir Tim Barrow was still formally in post but if he had been any more low-profile he would have counted as a fifth Vanguard subsmarine—until Powell took up the post at the beginning of December. In other words, Starmer has only just had a National Security Adviser for longer than the period during which he did not have one, although there are three Deputy National Security Advisers, Matthew Collins, Jonathan Black and Nick Catsaras. Nevertheless, this is bound to have been an impediment to planning and implementation, and may well explain why the new National Security Strategy was not even mentioned until February this year.

What will the National Security Strategy look like?

The Labour Party’s manifesto for the 2024 general election talked about the need to “uphold the first duty of any government: to keep the country safe”. A Labour government, it promised, would achieve this by “strengthening our armed forces and protecting our national security”. It recognised not just “the growing emergence of hybrid warfare, including cyber-attacks and misinformation campaigns” but also “threats from hostile states or state-sponsored groups”. Lamenting that “Britain lacks a comprehensive framework to protect us”, it pledged to “take the approach used for dealing with non-state terrorism and adapt it to deal with state-based domestic security threats”.

Within the ambit of national security, Labour’s manifesto particularly identified “food security”, but also pointed to energy security, secure borders and economic stability. It sketched out plans for a number of bilateral and multilateral relationships which would increase the UK’s security, and the government has signed agreements with Germany, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine and the European Union. There is also the trilateral AUKUS agreement with the United States and Australia, although this is now being reviewed by the Trump administration. The manifesto also asserted that:

Defending our security also means protecting the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, including the Falklands and Gibraltar. Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination.

That is perhaps an argument for another day.

Presumably the “comprehensive framework to protect us” which the manifesto mentioned is broadly speaking the sort of document Sir Keir Starmer envisages the National Security Strategy being. It is good that the government sees the broad sweep of national security, and is aware of the connections which can sometimes be missed by casual observers. It is clear, for example, that there is a linkage between the hard power of military capabilities, through traditional diplomacy to international aid and institutions of soft power and persuasion like the British Council and the BBC World Service. But national security is also affected by international trade, market regulation, anti-corruption, migration, climate change, demographic trends, access to natural resources, economic developments elsewhere in the world. Attempting to capture all of these while retaining coherence is a challenging task.

A small anecdotal example: when I was a clerk in the House of Commons, I had a minor role in the parliamentary team which, in co-operation with Whitehall, crafted and established the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. The creation of the oversight body had been specifically mentioned in the first National Security Strategy of 2008 and during 2008-09 we began to map out the details of how a joint committee would work, what its remit and membership might be, how it could add to and improve parliamentary scrutiny without duplicating existing institutions and where, in general terms, it might sit in the political landscape.

The decision was taken that the best way of addressing a wide range of policy areas, given that the joint committee was not expected to operate at the tempo of a normal departmental select committee, was to include in its House of Commons membership the chairmen of the relevant departmental committees as personification of joined-up scrutiny. That meant deciding which committees, and therefore which Whitehall departments, had a sufficiently substantial locus in “national security” to warrant inclusion.

When the House of Commons appointed its members to the joint committee on 13 January 2010, it included the chairmen of the following committees: Defence, Justice, International Development, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Security, Business, Innovation and Skills, Energy and Climate Change and Home Affairs. The House of Lords membership did not include any committee chairmen. Obviously some of those choices were obvious, like Defence and Foreign Affairs. Some were more finely balanced; I think if we were carrying out the same exercise now, more than 15 years later, the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (the Science and Technology Committee as it was in 2009-10) would automatically be included. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, at that point chaired by Sir Patrick Cormack, was not included—I honestly cannot remember if the idea was considered or not—and may have reflected a degree of optimism at the time about the security situation in Northern Ireland.

Drawing the boundary line of “national security” is hard.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham reported that the impending NSS would “broaden the scope of what is considered vital to UK interests to include critical domestic industries, crime, and the online world”. It would say:

that the definition of national security should be expanded beyond traditional threats like war, terrorism and espionage to encompass other risk areas such as the economy, food prices, supply chains, street crime and the internet.

This is an unsettling synopsis, if accurate. While the very purpose of the phrase “national security” is to embrace a broad sweep and make connections that might otherwise not be made, any definition must have its limits or it ceases to be a definition at all. If everything is national security, nothing is national security.

Of course it is challenging to find those dividing lines, and I don’t dismiss everything Wickham reports the government to be thinking and doing. There is a strong case for some inclusion of “critical domestic industries” within “national security”, and, connected to that, “supply chains”. Citing “the internet” and “the online world” is so vague as to mean nothing, but we call all think of areas on online activity—radicalisation, misinformation and disinformation, electoral fraud, the sale of prohibited items—which would warrant being brought within the ambit of national security.

On the other hand, I am much more uneasy about the potential inclusion of “crime” in the general sense, and “street crime” more specifically. I am sure, having done my time on the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, that a link can be traced, say, from street crime to gangs to organised crime to people trafficking to international criminal networks to fraud or corruption and to border security. But that does not necessarily mean, as Wickham’s report would seem to suggest, that the government proposes a position whereby shoplifting or mobile phone theft are national security issues. Nor would the apparatus and techniques familiar in national security necessarily be appropriate or effective in tackling them.

This matters for two reasons. The first is conceptual: if the government uses the wrong definition of “national security”, if it in effect misdiagnoses the problem or else treats the wrong symptoms, its policies will be less effective. In a world of forever-straitened circumstances, that means the government will waste money. The National Security Strategy not only needs to assess the threats accurately, it needs to pinpoint the most efficient and best value ways of addressing those threats. This is a version of the adage of shooting the archer, not the arrow: if the machinery of national security is addressing itself to street crime, for example, it may make considerable headway at a low level, but it will be doing little to mitigate or neutralise major long-term threats to UK security.

The second issue is a more mundane and inglorious one, and this may do the Prime Minister a disservice (although one should judge politicians on their records). It is now accepted as inevitable, I think, that the NATO summit will see the alliance’s leaders agree a new target for defence spending of five per cent of gross domestic product. Within that, there will be a little flexibility; as the Secretary General, Mark Rutte, put it in a Chatham House speech last week, “3.5 per cent will be invested in our core military requirements, while the rest will go towards defence and security related investments, including infrastructure and building industrial capacity”. He was keen to emphasise the urgency of this commitment.

Five per cent is not some figure plucked from the air, it is grounded in hard facts. The fact is, we need a quantum leap in our collective defence. The fact is, we must have more forces and capabilities to implement our defence plans in full. The fact is, danger will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends. Our decisions on defence spending are driven by NATO’s battle plans and capability targets. They define what forces and capabilities Allies need to provide.

This is a massively ambitious target. NATO’s own figures show that last year only 23 of the 32 member states spent more than the existing target of two per cent of GDP, and only six—Poland, Estonia, the United States, Latvia, Greece and Lithuania—spent more than 2.5 per cent (you will notice that four of those six countries border Russia; proximity sharpens the mind). While all member states are expected to meet the two per cent target this year, that is old news, and only one member, Poland, is spending more than four per cent of its GDP on defence (4.2 per cent in 2024 and expected to be 4.7 per cent in 2025).

All of this puts the United Kingdom in an acutely difficult position. As I wrote in The Spectator last week, when Sir Keir Starmer announced in February that British defence spending would rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 (I am currently discounting as worthless his “ambition to reach three per cent in the next parliament”, as ambition neither deters aggressors nor intercepts missiles), it was a welcome, if rather modest, move which would maintain the UK’s position towards the top of the table of defence spending. Yet, within four months, he is suddenly facing a need to double the Ministry of Defence’s budget, from 2.5 per cent of GDP to five per cent, simply to meet the NATO-wide target. And it is very difficult to see where that additional money comes from.

Typically, the government managed an unforced error on the admittedly difficult subject earlier in the week. At an event on Tuesday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, said that the 2.6 per cent spending the government will reach when Ministry of Defence expenditure has the intelligence budget added in was the maximum amount of spending until the general election.

We have now set that spending for this parliament. Any further increases in defence spending would be in a future parliament and we would seek a mandate to do that… in a way that was fully costed and fully funded.

Realising the inflexibility of this statement, the Treasury then said, incomprehensibly, that to interpret the Chancellor’s words as ruling out any increase in defence spending above 2.6 per cent in this parliament would be a “misreading”, even though that is precisely what she said. With characteristic panic, Reeves tried to deflect the issue by praising the increase to 2.6 per cent already announced, adding that there would be another spending review in two years’ time, when budgets could be revisited. In short, 2.6 per cent is or isn’t the maximum for this parliament, depending on whether you ask Rachel Reeves or Rachel Reeves.

It is against the backdrop of this kind of cack-handed doublespeak that we must judge Alex Wickham’s second strand of news. His Bloomberg article, moving on from the widening of the definition of “national security”, suggested that “broadening what is counted toward national security could allow the UK to include expenditure on areas like crime, as well as public investment in certain critical industries, towards the defense-aligned target”.

Here he is referring to the 1.5 per cent of what Mark Rutte called “defence and security related investments”. The government would still face a substantial gap between 2.6 per cent and 3.5 per cent spending on core defence capabilities, but that difference would be much less glaring and much more palatable to our allies if we were more or less fulfilling the 1.5 per cent of “related” spending.

It is not difficult to see the sort of legerdemain by which the Prime Minister might be tempted. Rutte’s definition included “infrastructure and building industrial capacity”, while Wickham reported phrases like “critical domestic industries” from the government; would it be utterly implausible, taking those two factors, to say that steel is a “critical domestic industry”, and therefore to include as “national security” or “defence and security related investments” the £500 million subsidy granted to Tata Steel, the £100 million already spent on taking control of British Steel and the potential £2.5 billion from the Steel Strategy which could be spent on the Scunthorpe steelworks? That would be a small contribution towards the 1.5 per cent of GDP but it would be money the government has already spent or is already planning to spend.

And this is the real danger. If the government focuses on finding enough expenditure to transfer to the appropriate column, it may avoid embarrassment and be able to maintain its role among NATO’s leading members. But it enhances our national security not a jot or tittle until it is new money being spent on new capabilities, or at least money being spent more wisely and more effectively. We can argue vigorously about what the defence budget should buy, what our core capabilities should be and what the focus of “defence and security related spending” should be, and, in the wake of the Strategic Defence Review, we will. But that is about real spending.

What we cannot tolerate is an attempt by the Prime Minister and the government to use the kind of obfuscatory language with which “national security” is often shot through to try to gull the electorate. The UK cannot meet its NATO spending commitments by shuffling budget lines and what Dominic Cummings might call “Potemkin spending”. Mark Rutte was very clear: NATO needs to spend more on the defence of Europe, and more by a long way.

That will not be easy for any member states, except perhaps Poland which has almost reached the target spontaneously. There will always be excuses, other priorities, political difficulties. I hope that Alex Wickham is wrong, that the Prime Minister is not planning this kind of grubby conjuring trick to avoid the disapproval of his international colleagues. But he and the Chancellor have a history of slippery misdirection and half-truths at best when it comes to spending and resources: the shamefully shoddy row over what constituted a “working person”, the £22 billion “black hole”, a good proportion of which was caused by government’s own decisions on public sector pay awards, the revision downwards of the money available to the National Wealth Fund.

If I can quote the Labour Party’s manifesto:

No policy commitment in pursuit of Labour’s missions matters unless we uphold the first duty of any government: to keep the country safe.

That is what all of this is about—the Strategic Defence Review, the National Security Strategy, NATO’s spending targets. It is the defence of the realm, and it has to be paid for.