As critiques go of the Starmer Government's scandalous neglect of defence and security, it doesn't get any more damning. 'We are not safe. National security is in peril. We are underprepared, underinsured, under attack.'
Yet the Government exhibits a 'corrosive complacency' when it comes to defence matters.
It gets worse: there's a growing gap between Keir Starmer's rhetoric and his actions because he is 'not willing to make the necessary investment' in our military. He is being aided in this 'vandalism' by 'non-military experts in the Treasury' who resist more money for defence.
Such criticisms would be embarrassing enough coming from respected political opponents or non-political defence experts. But they are doubly devastating because they came last night from George Robertson.
He was an esteemed defence secretary in the Blair years, Secretary General of Nato during the 9/11 attacks (when Article 5 of the Treaty was invoked mandating all alliance members to come to America's aid) - and was asked by Starmer when he became PM to chair a new strategic defence review.
That review was duly delivered on June 2, 2025, to general acclaim among mainstream politicians of all stripes. It was immediately accepted lock, stock and barrel by the Starmer Government.
The PM even went to Glasgow so he could use the Govan naval shipyard on the Clyde as a backdrop to describe it as 'a blueprint to make Britain safer and stronger - a battle-ready, armour-clad nation... with the most advanced capabilities, equipped for decades to come'.
How hollow these words sound now.
There is plenty of money available to rebuild our beleaguered military. All it requires is the political guts to do what is necessary. I regret to report that this won't happen under Starmer-Reeves.
I dined with Robertson, an old acquaintance, the night of Starmer's ringing endorsement.
'Are you sure the money will be forthcoming for all of this,' I asked him.
'I've had a commitment from Starmer himself,' he replied.
'Are you sure he'll stick to it?' I pushed him. At the time, Starmer had been in power for less than a year but already had a growing reputation for double-talk and U-turns.
Robertson was confident: a defence investment plan to implement the review had been promised within a matter of months.
Well, that was then, this is now - and we still have no idea where the money will come from to restore our hollowed-out military, which grows more threadbare by the week. Even John Healey, the current Defence Secretary, can't say if we'd have it by this autumn, when it would be a year late.
Robertson has been quietly simmering for some time. He has lobbied behind the scenes and issued some coded warnings in public. All to no avail.
So last night, he gave Starmer both barrels.
It is a measure of his frustration that he chose to do so this side of the May 7 elections, which will put the PM's leadership on the line again. But Starmer wasn't the only one in his sights.
As with all difficult matters that come across his desk, Starmer has delegated defence spending to someone else - in this case his Chancellor. Robertson blames Rachel Reeves for working with the Treasury to block extra defence spending. Hence his reference to Treasury 'vandalism'.
Reeves is now widely regarded in Whitehall as a second-rate Chancellor who knows nothing about defence and cares even less. In her second Budget last November, as the world became steadily more dangerous, she devoted a mere 40 words to the topic (a dismayed Robertson clocked that).
She didn't mention defence at all in her March Spring Statement, when there were even more threats to our national security.
Behind closed doors, she parrots the Treasury line that her self-imposed fiscal rules mean no more borrowing. She likes raising taxes - but not for defence.
So there just isn't the money to pay for major rearmament, she claims. It is, of course, a false narrative. Funding defence properly needn't require more borrowing or higher taxes. All it needs is the political will - courage, even - to take money from areas Labour has hitherto prioritised, above all welfare benefits and Net Zero energy policies, and move it to defence.
Robertson indicated this last night in probably his most damning sentence of all: 'We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.'
Indeed we cannot. But Starmer-Reeves are too frightened ('feart', as they say in Scotland) to confront the Labour tribe with this simple truth. So welfare spending soars and defence spending languishes.
Starmer-Reeves would rather pay people to do nothing than to pay for the defence of the realm. In the 2025-26 financial year just ended, welfare spending (including state pensions) of £333billion exceeded total revenues from income tax (£331billion) for the first time ever - indicating we no longer value work over welfare.
Welfare spending is officially forecast to rise to around £400billion by 2030 - a £70billion rise under Labour. Money is never short if it's for a purpose approved by the Labour tribe.
Labour will invest around £50billion in Ed Miliband's net zero vanity project, which so far has managed to lumber us with the most expensive energy costs in the world. That money should be diverted to defence to rebuild our military-industrial base.
The welfare bill will rise by £18billion in this financial year alone - enough to build 15 new frigates (twice the number we have) or 220 fighter jets (we have nothing like that amount) or pay the annual salaries of 250,000 soldiers (three times the size of the current British Army).
Welfare dependency has become unstoppable under Starmer-Reeves. More than 6.6million people of working age now claim out-of-work benefits. A total of 11million of working age don't work. Benefits for sickness and disability (increasingly claims based on dubious mental health issues) are soaring.
We already spend more on sickness/disability benefits than we do on defence. And it's getting worse. Some 1,000 new claimants sign on for disability benefits every week. The number claiming health-related inactivity benefits is rising ten times faster than the growth of the working age population.
By 2030, we're forecast to spend some £120billion a year on health/disability benefits alone - just under twice the current defence budget of £62billion.
Even without the need to rearm, the case for welfare reform to get a grip on this runaway spending would be enormous. Given the pressing need to release resources to defend ourselves, the case is unanswerable.
Even a modest 'tough love' approach to welfare reform, which made it more difficult to claim benefits indefinitely for doing nothing, would make a difference. Just getting one million back to work of the millions working age currently idle would generate £18billion a year in reduced welfare spending and extra tax revenues.
That would help fill some of the gap in our defence spending quite nicely. And, since state pensions now account for over half welfare spending, it is time to save billions more by ending the triple lock, the doctrine that dictates pensions must rise every April by the highest of three metrics: earnings growth, inflation, or 2.5 per cent.
Welfare spending counts as current spending. The military badly needs more current spending to pay better wages, increase manpower all round, work defence facilities more productively. Welfare reform would free up the tens of billions required, with big dividends from the start.
But defence also needs capital investment if our military is to be equipped with the latest technologies at scale.
Labour will invest around £50billion in Ed Miliband's net zero vanity project, which so far has managed to lumber us with the most expensive energy costs in the world while having an insignificant impact on global C02 emissions.
That money, too, should be diverted to defence to rebuild our military-industrial base.
So there is plenty of money available - for current spending and investment - to rebuild our beleaguered military. All it requires is the political guts to do what is necessary.
I regret to report that this won't happen under Starmer-Reeves. Their priority is to save their political skins. That means pandering to the Labour tribe's welfare obsessions and indifference to defence.
Nothing will change that. Robertson has done a public service in speaking up for the proper funding of his defence review and prioritising rearmament over welfare.
But the Labour Party of which he was once a proud defence secretary is not today's Labour Party. His words will likely fall on deaf ears - and we will remain condemned to be more defenceless than at any time in modern history.