In her speech at the London Defence Conference, Kemi Badenoch set out why Britain must urgently rethink defence in a rapidly changing world.
Including making tough spending decisions to ensure defence is properly funded.
Watch and read her full speech below 👇👇
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While the outcome of this war in Iran remains uncertain, what’s clear is that the United States is playing by very different rules than we’re used to.
Are we in the age of Donald Trump, an age that will end when he leaves office or is this President a symptom of a changing world and a permanently changed United States?
More importantly, what should Britain do about it?
America remains the world’s pre-eminent military superpower. But for decades, the era of unchallenged American-led Western dominance has been eroding.
The rise of China. The re-emergence of Russian imperial ambition in Eastern Europe. The rejection, in many democratic nations, of a supposed liberal international order holding the West together.
The Atlantic alliance seems under greater strain every day.
Many people find President Trump’s actions to be an anathema. They find his words unstatesmanlike, his treatment of allies needlessly provocative.
Some of the President’s social media comments and posts have dismayed me too.
Perhaps his successor will return to more traditional diplomacy. Perhaps not.
Regardless, we must not miss the underlying lesson.
Trump’s presidency is not the start, but a continuation of a change in US outlook.
For decades, the United States has been complaining, at least privately, that Europe is pulling their weight on defence.
President Trump may be unorthodox in how he speaks to us, but there are forces at play here that are much larger than his presidency.
The mirror that he is holding up to Europe and that we find so uncomfortable to look in is showing us that without the United States, we cannot properly defend ourselves.
At present, European strategic autonomy is a fairy tale.
Even parts of our own British nuclear deterrent are dependent on America.
Whether these shifting sands are being driven by Donald Trump doesn’t matter.
Britain’s response and the actions we must now take are the same either way.
We must reassert ourselves as a serious power in the world.
Show our allies what we bring to the table. Show our enemies that we are ready to defend ourselves.
If we do not, we will have no say in whatever comes next.
This is not the first time that the world has changed.
Throughout history, great powers and great alliances have risen and they have fallen.
Athens, Rome, Imperial Spain, The Ottomans, The British Empire.
Every time the world has changed, it has continued to be governed by facts of life.
Geography. Strength. Diplomacy. Strategy. And ever-developing technology.
The same is true today…
Look at the threats we face in the world.
China. Russia. Iran. North Korea.
These countries do not share a common ideology.
What they do share is a common objective: to weaken the West and promote their own economic and strategic interests.
The West’s shared ideology is a strength that our adversaries lack.
But for too long, we have believed that the righteousness of our shared ideology would be enough for us to prevail.
It is not.
The cold hard reality is that if the West is to prevail every country with an interest in freedom must conduct an urgent and brutally honest audit of what we bring to the table.
The question I will answer today is: what action must government take to turn Britain into a strong power and reliable ally.
A country that can look after itself and that other countries want on their side.
We must start by asking ourselves, what exactly do we currently have to offer?
What leverage do we have?
Why would people want us on their side?
A hundred years ago, this was obvious.
Britain had the world’s largest navy, world leading industry, and an Empire and influence that spanned the globe.
We still have the bravest and one of the most highly skilled Armed Forces in the world.
We have intelligence capabilities that are universally acknowledged to be world-class.
We have outstanding special forces and nuclear submarines, whose heroic crews have delivered a Continuous at Sea Deterrent for decades.
But beyond that, we have allowed ourselves to drift into the role of commentator with little capability.
General Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the government’s Strategic Defence Review, stripped away the pretence when he said: “Today's army, frankly, could do one very small thing. It could seize a small market town on a good day.”
The heart of every patriot, everyone who cares about our Armed Forces, will have shrunk at the news that our Royal Navy had not a single warship in the gulf as war was breaking out and then at the time it took to get HMS Dragon to the Mediterranean, only for her to run into technical problems.
You don’t need to be a military expert to know that this is not how things should be.
I pay tribute to Dragon’s crew and everyone serving in the Middle East right now.
This is not the fault of the Royal Navy.
It is the culmination of long-standing policy failures, which have left our defence capabilities arguably at their weakest in 400 years.
I don’t need to tell you how this happened.
Between 1989 and 2022, defence spending fell in every year.
One of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review has since said: “the UK is trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity because politicians won’t make the case for cutting spending to fund defence”.
And he’s not the only one who thinks that.
In Washington, US administrations have felt for years that, while America subsidised the defence of Europe, we built welfare systems instead.
On this point, they are right.
Before the Second World War, 1 in every £7 the British government spent… went on health and welfare.
By last year, it had soared to 1 in every ÂŁ3.
We have grown fat on welfare, prioritising benefits over bullets.
Britain has overspent the supposed “peace dividend” that followed the Cold War.
And politicians of all colours as well as the electorate prioritised more immediate, day to day concerns over defence.
They ignored evidence that this era of peace wouldn’t go on forever.
They looked away from Georgia, from Crimea, hoping they were anomalies.
Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
That was the moment we couldn’t ignore.
The Conservative government responded rapidly and unequivocally.
We led the world in convening support.
We trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and equipped them with our missiles.
If it wasn’t for our actions, Kyiv could now very well be under Russian control.
And we found the money to increase defence spending.
That was not enough.
For a proud nation used to stamping its influence on the world, Britain’s lack of readiness for this war in Iran has been shocking.
We weren’t just unprepared militarily with no Royal Navy warships in the Middle East for the first time in decades.
We were strategically unprepared too.
The UK government was warned about U.S.-Israeli strikes in advance.
It was obvious that in the event of a conflict, our bases and our allies would be targeted.
But just before the conflict began, our only active minesweeper was taken out of the Gulf.
Our only active destroyer was stuck in Portsmouth docks.
We seemingly had no plan to protect our citizens in the region.
Britain looked taken by surprise and woefully unprepared, while our allies in France and in Greece mobilised quickly.
And it happened because we have a government that was politically unprepared for this war. Distracted by its own infighting and psychodrama.
Too busy scratching itches from opposition about the two-child benefit cap, about taxing children’s education, to notice what was coming.
They have spent more time reversing their own decisions than preparing for this war looking inward instead of outward.
I’m not a military expert but I do understand the nature of power.
Power does not come from wishful thinking.
Power does not come from speeches about values if those values are not defended by hard capability.
I will be honest, the Conservative Party made mistakes in government.
We did not do enough, early enough, to rebuild the resilience and readiness that a more dangerous world required.
We are under new management.
I will not repeat those mistakes, but we need Labour and other parties to learn those lessons too.
The Lib Dems think the answer is more borrowing when we are already paying more on debt interest than we spend on defence.
The SNP to give up our nuclear weapons, the Greens want us to leave NATO.
Nigel Farage is still blaming NATO for the invasion of Ukraine.
Reform haven’t even bothered to announce who their foreign or defence spokesmen are.
Reform plan to spend the billions from restoring the two child benefit cap not on defence…but on cheaper beer.
This is not serious.
The war in the Gulf must act as a wake up call.
Not for navel gazing or finger pointing about who did what…but for action.
Let’s start by urgently deploying the resources that we do have to serve our national interest in this conflict.
We must show our allies and our enemies that we are willing to get our hands dirty.
That doesn’t mean that when the Trump says jump, we ask, “How high?”
No.
It means acting decisively to protect Britain’s interest.
What message does it send to our allies when we don’t defend our own bases from attack?
How would bygone captains of the Royal Navy feel if they knew we were bailed out by the French?
Of course, we must be careful how we tread but sitting on the fence is not a strategy.
We must look beyond this conflict in the Middle East and develop the resources we need to respond to this new era of threats.
We have a huge amount of work to do to reassert Britain as a power in the world.
First and foremost, we must rearm.
If our military is strengthened, our hand is strengthened.
We must undertake the biggest peacetime programme of rearmament in our country’s history.
To do that, we need the money to pay for it.
Keir Starmer claims he wants to spend 3% of GDP on defence.
Last year, his government published a Strategic Defence Review explaining why we need it.
But here we are, nine months later, and we still haven’t seen the Defence Investment Plan.
It was promised last autumn.
We’re hearing it won’t be coming till next autumn.
This is a national scandal.
Yesterday, the Defence Secretary told you not to worry because we are ready.
I’m not here to lie to you.
At a time of war in Europe and war in the Middle East, at a time when these conflicts are affecting every family across Britain, at a time when Britain’s place in the world is in flux, our government literally doesn’t have a plan.
There’s no plan for how the Government is going to buy the equipment, weapons and munitions.
There’s no plan for how to enact the Strategic Defence Review.
There’s no plan for rearming Britain.
I asked Keir Starmer about this at PMQs and he put his head in his hands.
The reason there’s no plan is because they have no idea how they are going to pay for it.
It’s time to make some tough choices!
The question is not whether Britain must rearm.
It is what choices we must make to do so.
That is what seriousness looks like and that is what my new Conservative Party has been doing.
I have announced that the next Conservative government would reinstate the two-child benefit cap, three billion pounds, and spend that money on defence.
That will fund the largest net increase in British troops under any government since the Second World War.
We will use the money to recruit 6,000 regular soldiers and 14,000 reservists as well as paying for their accommodation and equipment.
I have said that we will reallocate £17 billion from Government R&D and Ed Miliband’s disastrous Net Zero projects to create a new Sovereign Defence Fund.
This fund will invest in British defence start-ups, protecting our supply chains and delivering drone technology right across our Armed Forces, ensuring our Army, Navy and Air Force can fight as war is fought today.
It is not yet 3%, but it is a start.
We will find more savings till we get there.
I have chosen my priority… and that is to keep British families safe.
This will require tough decisions.
But rearming Britain cannot wait until the next Conservative Government.
So, I say to the Prime Minister, let’s put our party interests aside
Let’s find the money to rearm.
Let’s identify the spending cuts.
And if we reach agreement on a joint plan, Conservatives will support those measures in Parliament on a three-line whip.
Some of you may not know but I didn’t start work with a politics background.
I trained as an engineer.
In engineering, something either works or it doesn’t.
It’s either built or it isn’t.
There’s no hiding behind clever phrases when the bridge collapses or the system fails.
Too often in politics, we do the opposite.
We treat words as a substitute for action.
And that might work for a while in some areas of government.
It does not work in defence.
Last year at this conference, the Prime Minister said “Defence was the central organising principle of his government”.
Nothing he has done since then has shown that to be true.
Our Armed Forces cannot be strengthened by press releases, and our enemies are not deterred by speeches.
They are deterred by ships in the water, jets in the air, munitions in stock, and allies who know we will turn up.
So, if I have one ambition in this role, it is to drag our politics closer to engineering: to move from mere performance to delivery.
Here’s what Defence as a central organising principle looks like.
Doing five key things.
First: Building capacity with new equipment, key capabilities and cutting-edge technology.
So, we must think carefully about what weapons are most useful to deter aggression against us.
Modern warfare is entering an era of mass, cheap, autonomous weaponry.
Drones are becoming obsolete after 6 weeks in the field – six weeks.
Buying kit that takes 10 years to build but can be destroyed by a cheap piece of fiberglass is not a good use of our money.
We must gear up for this era of rapid innovation in warfare.
That means making sure our military is integrated with the private sector.
We have a superb defence industry in this country, some of the most strategically valuable companies in the world.
We have world leading AI and quantum sectors which will play a huge role in the next generation of weaponry.
Britain is well placed to do smart rearmament.
Our economy stands to gain tens of billions if we get it right.
Second: Supporting our defence industry with better regulation and nimble procurement.
Britain has a proud military history.
Naturally, we have sought state-of-the-art capability in every area of combat.
But we must face the reality that defence procurement has taken too long, and costs have not been controlled.
The war in Ukraine shows us the folly of this.
If we want to turbocharge our defence industry, we must first remove the structural barriers that are currently blocking investment.
And government needs to dismantle the red tape holding companies back.
The Ukrainians want to build drones in the UK.
They need giga-factories pumping out millions of drones.
But drone manufacturers are struggling to get bank accounts because of absurd ESG regulations.
It can take 6 months to get permission to test drones in the UK.
Britain cannot slow the world down.
We must speed up to meet its pace.
Last month, I visited Msubs - a small defence company in Devon, who are developing cutting edge maritime drones.
But they are having to test their drones abroad because our regulations won’t let them test beyond the breakwater.
How are we supposed to deliver the navy of the future if our defence companies cannot test drones in the open seas?
Third: Prioritising Cheap energy.
How can our defence industry compete when it pays four times more for electricity than American businesses?
Britain is especially vulnerable to energy price shocks because we are not treating our energy security like the national emergency it is.
It is time to ditch the green levies choking businesses, drill our own oil and gas, and get Britain’s industry moving.
Fourth: Ending the lawfare which is weakening Britain.
We need to stop pursuing our veterans through the courts.
Of course, our soldiers should fight within the law.
But the reality of war is that split-second decisions determine life and death.
Pursuing decent people through the courts decades later as Labour is doing with its Troubles legislation is not only morally wrong, it limits our ability to recruit and retain people in the military, particularly our special forces.
That is why my party’s policy is to leave the ECHR.
Because, among other things, we must protect our veterans and our servicemen and women.
The Labour government’s obsession with lawfare is summed up by their Chagos deal.
The site of a vital US/UK Defence base that they are giving away to a country in the orbit of China and paying billions of pounds to do so.
This is astonishingly naive.
It is romantic fiction to believe that countries will judge us based on how nice we are.
They will judge us on what we bring to the table, on what leverage we bring, on what power we can protect and enforce.
How much does our value to the US decrease if we give the Chagos Islands away?
How much less do they need us?
How much more do we need them?
So, I welcome the news that the Chagos surrender may finally be on the dust heap where it belongs.
This latest U-turn underscores yet again the value of Conservatives in opposition, fighting for what we believe in until the Government changes its mind.
And fifth in this strategy: Not only must Britain offer something to its allies, we must be ready to stand up for ourselves if that’s what it comes to.
Look at Poland.
They understand the threat on their doorstep.
They have orders in place for up to 1,500 tanks by 2030.
Britain has fewer than a tenth of that in operation.
The Poles know what they believe in and they are ready to defend it.
No doubt they feel stronger as part of an alliance, but they can also defend themselves alone, if they must.
Look at Finland, who can mobilise 285,000 fully trained and equipped troops in a matter of days.
Both countries show that this goes beyond funding.
You also need political will.
That’s what Defence as a central organising principle in government looks like.
That’s what’s missing and that’s why we are not ready.
Finally, Britain must find the line between loyalty to our allies and strategic independence.
As an American friend put it recently, there are two kinds of country in the world these days: Those that talk, and those that fight.
President Trump is right to question whether Europe is ready to face the threats of our age.
He is right to question what we bring to our alliance with the United States.
But he was wrong to insult Britain’s army and navy.
He was wrong to denigrate our brave servicemen and women who served in Afghanistan.
And he was wrong to make childish remarks about the Prime Minister.
I’m Keir Starmer’s biggest critic but close allies should disagree in private.
The West needs to present a united front.
Idle threats about Canada and Greenland do not serve our interests.
They directly benefit our enemies.
The more we squabble about Greenland, the less we focus on Ukraine and Taiwan.
And our enemies are delighted every time Western bonds weaken.
They are using every lever they can pull to accelerate it, weaponising social media, funding illegal immigration, and disrupting trade.
Make no mistake, the geopolitical objective of the Chinese Communist Party, its dependents in the Kremlin, Islamist militants and anti-Western dictatorships is to isolate, then surround and eventually defeat the United States.
America is right to hold a mirror up to our end of the bargain, but it is wrong to think that it can beat this threat with an isolationist, America First approach.
American self-interest requires engagement, not isolation.
So, we must reset our relations with the United States.
Whether we like it or not, Europe cannot easily fend for herself, without a strong alliance with Washington.
Only the Conservative Party is speaking honestly about the threat we face, and only the Conservative Party is beginning to set out what readiness will require.
This should be a moment of huge concern, but I also think it’s a moment of hope because realism is not pessimism.
Realism is the beginning of serious action.
Realism is how nations survive.
The world is moving too fast to wait until the next election.
We need to force this government to confront reality now.
Britain has the strengths that matter: outstanding servicemen and women, brilliant intelligence, world-class universities, a powerful defence sector, leading-edge technology, and the freedom to act, if we choose to use it.
So, this is not a message of despair.
It is a call to seriousness.
A call to rebuild.
A call to be ready.
The countries that thrive in this century will not be the ones with the best speeches.
They will be the ones with the clearest eyes, the strongest nerves, and the hard power to defend what they value.
That is what readiness requires.
And that is the work I want us to begin now.
