BRITAIN

Intro: Putin’s totalitarian regime and its war in Ukraine is synonymous with Hitler and Nazi Germany. As Churchill urged in the 1930s, that’s why we need to spend much more on defence. It’s woefully inadequate

IN May 1953, Sir Winston Churchill told a Coronation lunch being held in Westminster Hall, “Study history. Study history . . . In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” One of the reasons Churchill was an historian himself was because he profoundly believed that a primary purpose for studying the past was to inform and encourage action in the present.

What are we to make then of Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s recent reference to history – his powerful speech to the United Nations in which he equated Russia’s actions towards Ukraine with the way that Hitler and the Nazis behaved in the 1930s?

Lord Cameron’s speech was precipitated after the Russian ambassador tried to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of being a Nazi. The Foreign Secretary responded by saying: “The only people behaving like Nazis are Putin and his cronies who thought they could invade a country, take its territory, and ultimately the world would look away.”

There are serious political consequences that follow upon equating Putin to Hitler, and one of them is that you need to put your money where your mouth is. You cannot make such a comparison, and then not spend the necessary money to counter the threat that you have just articulated in front of the whole world.

You cannot act as Churchill did before the Second World War, which was to warn the world of the impending threat, but not then do what Churchill did, which was to call for largescale rearmament to deal with it.

There are absolutely no signs that the UK Government is prepared to do this. In last week’s spring Budget, the Chancellor made no commitment to spending more on defence.

Britain currently pays just 2 per cent of her national income on defence, and that figure can be reached only by adding the costs of such indirect defence expenditures like widows’ pensions and the intelligence services. Strip out the nuclear deterrent costs and Britain pays the equivalent of 1.75% of GDP on defence.

At a time when we are witnessing the worst war in Europe since 1945, the British Army itself cannot even fill its already-depleted ranks, the RAF is mothballing its fighter squadrons, and the Royal Navy can barely put a flotilla together to protect shipping in the Red Sea, while its recent Trident missile test was an embarrassing national failure.

Meanwhile, Moscow is threatening to put nuclear weapons into space.

In the 1930s, Churchill articulated the pressing need for boosting spending on all three services. That was pivotal in deterring the Nazis if at all possible, or to defeat them if not. Churchill started warning of the dangers the Nazis posed within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor, telling the House of Commons on April 13, 1933, that, “As Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbours… while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of European war.”

By November of that year, Churchill was speaking of “the obvious fear which holds all the nations who are neighbours of Germany”. This also has modern parallels with the way that Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland view Putin’s Russia. In a 2021 essay written before the full-scale invasion in which Putin laid claim to Ukraine being Russian territory, he mentioned Lithuania in a similar vein no fewer than 17 times.

Yet the British Army is in danger of becoming merely “a domestically-centred land force” with no capacity for projecting force overseas to defend our allies. That was a view expressed in a leaked letter from the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders. There is no hyperbole in what he writes.

By early 1934, Churchill was saying the RAF needed far more fighter and bomber aircraft. Following the declaration of war by Germany, Churchill warned: “Within the next few hours the crash of bombs exploding in London and cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will apprise us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences.” The nation was still mourning the Great War and refused to listen, fearing that rearming might provoke another, or by his own government which thought him an opportunistic warmonger.

Churchill recognised that far from provoking war, heavy Western rearmament might instead deter the man whom David Cameron has now compared to Putin. “I could not see how you could prevent war better,” Churchill said in July 1934, “than by confronting an aggressor with the prospect of such a vast concentration of force, moral and material, that even the most reckless, even the most infuriated leader would not attempt to challenge those great forces.” Instead, however, public apathy won the day, and British rearmament was postponed until it was almost too late.

“Moral and material.” Churchill understood that the demoralisation of the West, in the sense that democracies such as Britain and France were weak and divided, influenced the decision-making of the totalitarians in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Similarly, moral vigour is desperately needed on the part of the United States, the G7, NATO, and Britian today in order to deter countries such as Russia, China, and Iran from ripping up the rules-based international order.

No message would be stronger, especially in the aftermath of the suspicious death in custody of Alexei Navalny, than if the West were to sequester the $300billion of Russia’s frozen assets presently being held in Brussels and give it to Ukraine for its defence and reconstruction.

That would be the Churchillian approach. But does our present Government have the anti-appeasing moral vigour to do it?

Fervently, we should all hope so. In stark truth, the Government needs to do far more than just this. It must increase defence spending to a minimum of 3.5 per cent of GDP. The Budget would have been an ideal moment to show it plans to do so, but – as we have seen – the Treasury continues to sit on its hands.

It’s not as if an increase to 3.5 per cent would be an earth-shattering break with custom and practice. Historically, defence spending was around 5.5 per cent of GDP during much of the 1970s and reached 6 per cent during the Falklands War in 1982.

Neville Chamberlain’s government finally woke up to the Nazi threat, and it was able to build the Hurricanes and Spitfires that saved Britain. The year of peace bought by the humiliating Munich Agreement was used by the Nazis to build much more weaponry and train many more soldiers than Britain, but nonetheless British air defences were in a much better state in 1940 than in 1938.

Modern defence industries require far longer research and development lead times today than in the 1930s, so if rearmament is to take place using new technologies, there can be no time to waste. Logistically, we currently have only enough 155mm shells – the standard type – in this country for one week of fighting at the rate experienced in Ukraine today. That’s how limited we are.

Churchill would be sickened by the brinkmanship being practised by Britain in the presence of a clearly growing global threat to democracy by evil totalitarian and murderous regimes.

Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, once wrote: “That men do not learn the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.” Lord Cameron may have correctly used the Second World War as the analogy by which to judge our present dangers, but where is the clear counterpart to go with that, namely large-scale rearmament?  

Back in the 1930s, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs how his exhortations were ignored by fellow parliamentarians. “Although the House listened to me with close attention,” he said, “I felt a sensation of despair. To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one’s country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action, was an experience most painful.”

Are we to undergo something similar now?