Rethinking Security’s new report summarises three roundtable discussions with people working across a range of human security, peace and climate issues.
After the publication of the Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy, in mid-2025, Prime Minister at the time Kier Starmer and his Defence Secretary John Healey (now Chancellor) had repeatedly proposed a national conversation on security and ‘defence’, and called for unity behind these strategies.
This national conversation was never undertaken under Starmer, yet hugely significant decisions were made by the government to cut overseas development spending in order to increase the MOD’s budget, and there is now open debate about whether welfare should be cut to increase ‘defence’ spending. Investment in defence, we are told, will create jobs in military industries, sparking economic renewal: a “defence dividend.”
These roundtable discussions asked participants what the effect of this step-change in funding for, and rhetoric about, security has meant for the area in which they work and the people and communities they support, many of whom face daily insecurities.
The findings tell of a society in which difference of opinion, immigration status and inequality have seen people bear the brunt of the ‘national security’ agenda. Bringing those working directly on human security issues together to listen to the impact of ‘national security’ policy is an initial step in opening up the conversation on security and building a grassroots alternative to the dangerous and increasingly militarised status quo approach that the NSS represents.
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And find out more about the webinar series with speakers from the roundtables:
