Three months into his premiership, Andy Burnham seems uncomfortable with growing domestic and international pressure to increase military spending. Larry Attree argues that the PM should query received wisdom on national security, and sets out five big shifts that the PM could make to reset UK security strategy in a sustainable direction.
Having assumed power amid a worrying slump in Labour’s poll ratings, Andy Burnham has a rare opportunity to rethink the UK’s security strategy and policies. The new PM’s reputation as a good listener, concern with people’s well-being and the cost of living, and his desire to salvage Labour’s ethical reputation on Gaza, all suggest a potential to recentre security on human needs and values. Another summer of deadly heat, and the incipient El Niño, offer an immediate opportunity to reaffirm the urgency of a green pivot for the nation. His communication skills may enable him to counter the disinformation and polarisation that have made coherent, holistic security strategy difficult to maintain. With a huge Commons majority, strong party backing and a bounce in public popularity, he has the scope to take his own view.
Nonetheless there are many reasons why Burnham may well rehash the complacency and path dependency of the Starmer era. Lacking foreign and security policy experience, the temptation will be to focus domestically and defer to established voices. Burnham’s Chancellor, John Healey, and Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, are both major national political figures who facilitated his ascendancy. Both are deeply committed to pumping huge sums into defence industrialisation. He will be reluctant to cross them. The bond markets are making it very hard for the Prime Minister to put money even into defence, let alone take a broader security view.
The case for rethinking national security strategy
While a security rethink already appears unlikely, it is nonetheless essential, and much depends on Burnham – and his potentially progressive Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband – questioning received wisdom and taking a fresh view.
Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy, both published in June 2025, were very narrow exercises. They failed to weigh the case for balancing defence industry demands with the urgent need to support sustainability, peacebuilding, development and social cohesion. The defence establishment’s demands for both legacy platforms and new weapons systems and technologies were adopted into policy by cursorily gutting the FCDO, including both its expertise and its peace, development and humanitarian funds.
Starmer’s strategy also redoubled the UK commitment to its alliance with the US and its reliance on NATO.
This was a deeply flawed strategy whose shortcomings are already manifest, especially in relation to the volatile relationship with Washington, and will become more obvious with time. Burnham needs the courage and instincts to consult more widely, think more broadly, and correct course as soon as possible.
Rebalancing UK security strategy – five key shifts
A successful security rethink would include five key shifts.
Reinvesting in long-term peace
Firstly, even inside the security establishment, a wide range of voices has criticized the cuts to conflict prevention, peacebuilding and development. The world is experiencing record levels of conflict and very high levels of forced displacement. These crises can’t be contained by better armed troops and barbed wire fences. They require constructive mediation and long-term investments in the reforms and development programmes that can tackle their structural causes. Investing in this is not just a moral imperative but also important for UK and international stability and prosperity, and constructively managing migration pressures. Peacebuilding is effective, and is also much cheaper than militarised stabilisation. It does not capture the headlines that war does, but conflict prevention and peacebuilding must have a central place in UK foreign and security policy.
Urgent action on ecosystem breakdown
Secondly, the government’s own assessment has warned of ecosystem collapse as a result of the climate emergency. Climate change is already impacting UK food prices, transport systems and public well-being. Our dependence on fossil fuels is likewise making the cost of living hard to bear for most UK citizens. In this context, Starmer’s cuts to international climate spending and caution over green investments make zero sense. If Burnham and Miliband accelerate sovereign green energy investments and international climate coalition building, their decisions will be popular now, and only look more strategic as time goes on.
Domestic social cohesion
The third pillar of a new approach to national security under Burnham must be domestic social cohesion. On the one hand, Burnham’s drive to reduce living costs while strengthening services and making people feel more enfranchised could do much to reverse polarisation and discontent. On the other, to defend social cohesion, effective action on public well-being needs to be coupled with a resolute drive to regulate the social and conventional media platforms peddling disinformation, polarisation and hatred. The UK will need to work alongside the EU and others to call time on those who profiteer from division and hate within and beyond the UK. Success is a vital way to guarantee the ‘epistemic security’ in which coherent democratic policy-making can remain resilient in the UK and Europe.
Rethinking defence policy and posture
The fourth pillar must then be to revisit the UK’s defence policy. The UK needs to define itself as a nation determined to deescalate and avoid war wherever possible, but well prepared to defend itself and push back on imperialist aggression as a last resort.
As such it should focus less on belligerent rhetoric and projecting global power, and more on readiness to defend itself (and like-minded countries where feasible and justified) from hostile powers.
Rethinking alliances and multilateralism
While it may take years to end UK dependence on the US in certain respects, it is essential that the UK is working towards doing so as fast as possible, and shores up its partnerships with other middle powers to hedge against threats and volatility emanating from the world’s great powers and their wars.
Greater autonomy and prudence in its choice of allies can enable the UK to uphold the values the world needs to restore, to support action on global challenges with like-minded players, while avoiding supporting unjust or unwise military engagements. Refocusing on international law and international cooperation, not least through the United Nations and its agencies, should be central to this. Working creatively and flexibly with other coalitions of the willing is likewise essential.
Resetting the conversation on security
A big question looming over next year’s Spring Spending Review is how to afford the UK’s defence posture. As well as revisiting its military posture and partnerships, Burnham’s team needs to adopt a healthy scepticism about waste and cost-effectiveness across the defence establishment. AUKUS and the wider ‘defence nuclear enterprise’ are eye wateringly expensive, have extremely long timeframes, and sustain UK dependence on the US, all to produce dangerous weapons systems that the UK would hope never to use (even if they are not obsolete upon arrival).
These are just two examples of the UK’s incontinence on defence spending, which prompted Labour itself to call for ‘a revolution in the way [the MOD] controls costs’. A significant issue is the huge inefficiency deriving from undisciplined management of defence procurement. Cosy, revolving-door relationships in particular create risks that conflicts of interests radically undermine the quality of matériel produced while squandering public money.
In this context, Burnham – recalling his wisdom in challenging the establishment narrative on Hillsborough, and demanding better of the Greater Manchester police –needs the gumption to question the groupthink in defence circles. Boosterish language about defence investments leading to growth and jobs simply doesn’t add up. Public investment in other areas could deliver significantly more growth and jobs for working people.
Getting to 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 is thus unquestionably the wrong target for the nation. Instead, Burham must reset the terms of debate to centre it on delivery of relevant capabilities – not on merely delivering spending increases (or bankrolling a lethal reindustrialisation drive whatever the cost). He must be prepared to make tougher choices about what capabilities a defensive Euro-Atlantic middle power genuinely needs. Together with Mssrs Healey and Streeting, he must drive through much more disciplined management of defence procurement to eliminate conflicts of interest, mismanagement and waste from a deeply unaccountable and profligate UK defence sector.
In broader foreign policy, the PM has a team more receptive to a more sustainable, cooperative approach to international security. Miliband has taken a more critical approach to Israel than any recent foreign secretary, even if this could go further. He is also setting out a more active stance on climate, development and multilateralism. Kirsty McNeill, the new development minister, has also reaffirmed Labour’s commitments to solidarity, shared security and human security.
And on social cohesion and welfare, Burnham himself has been clear that “national security can’t come at the expense of social security.” If Labour fails to see off an October by-election challenge from the Green Party in the central London seat that Starmer has just vacated, pressure will only grow from the left of his party for a more radical reset.
With a new strategic approach, Burnham can cultivate Britain’s autonomy from a deeply illiberal US, keep the country out of unnecessary wars, strengthen UK defences, and reinvest the savings back into equally urgent national security priorities – peace, development, sustainability and domestic social cohesion. This would be both a successful way to protect the safety and well-being of British people, and to bring people together around a progressive national – and human – security vision.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Flickr. Prime Minister Andy Burnham meets with Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO, on his visit to Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, 16 September 2026.
