CAN NORWAY TRUST BRITAIN?

 

(THIS IS AN ABRIDGED VERSION OF THE SPEECH I GAVE IN OSLO ON AUGUST 24, 2026)

Headline: Britain has two defence policies when it can only afford one. The conventional force is essentially an underfunded and fading influence buyer in Washington, a vestige of past power. The nuclear force is the ultimate insurance in the event NATO collapses and Britain is forced to retreat onto its nuclear armed island.  Britain funds neither force sufficiently and thus both are sub-optimal.  

No. Lunna House agreement or not. This is because British security and defence policy is a monumental bluff with Britain’s armed forces critically lacking the firepower, the mass of force and the ability to manoeuvre it should have given Britain`s weight, place in NATO and what fighting power Britain needs to lead and fight in the twenty-first century.  Why? 

First, most of the so-called defence reviews since 2010 have been amongst the greatest works of British fiction with the British Establishment retreating ever deeper into the political spin that is defence pretence. In 2010, the British armed forces were cut by 10% at a stroke even though they were engaged in a major campaign in Afghanistan. 

Second, HM Treasury economists still see affording the defence of Britain as discretionary expenditure even though Russia invaded Ukraine and the British are also spending billions supporting the Ukrainians.  

The consequence is there for all to see.  The weakening of British defence readiness is so bad that Britain today ranks 31st out of 32 in progress towards Alliance capability requirements and rearmament goals. That places Britain is just ahead of Iceland which has no standing armed forces.    

More proof? I spoke at the London Defence Conference in May, which was attended by your Chief of Defence.  I started by congratulating the Russian Navy for successfully escorting a British military tanker successfully through the channel because that is all the Royal Navy had available to escort a Russian frigate.  

Then, I demolished the then Secretary of State for Defence John Healey, who had just spoken, for claiming Britain had a “warfighting force on a war footing”. It does not and is not. 

I then addressed Ukraine: yes, Britain has taken the lead but what to what end? What is the strategy other than keeping Kyiv in the fight and waiting for the Americans to get serious and come over the horizon? What about Britain’s own defences?  Where is the defensive effort needed to harden Britain´s critical infrastructure, most notably its critical undersea infrastructure other than warning the Russians, “we know what you´re doing?”  

Then I focused on the greatest weakness of British defence policy. Britain has two defence policies when it can only afford one. The conventional force is essentially an underfunded and fading influence buyer in Washington, a vestige of past power. The nuclear force is the ultimate insurance in the event NATO collapses and Britain is forced to retreat onto its nuclear armed island.  

Britain funds neither force sufficiently and thus both suffer from dangerous weaknesses.  London tries to hide this by regularly announcing absolute increases in investment rather than investment relative to what the force needs given the threat. London also routinely lies. In August 2026, the National Statistics Authority officially sanctioned then Prime Minister Kier Starmer for misleading Parliament when he claimed he would increase defence expenditure by £270 billion over the course of this Parliament. The real figure is £15 billion, with £272.2 billion the total spend over four years 

The July Defence Investment Plan also claimed to have found an additional £15 billion for defence, when in fact it found only £5 billion of additional funding. The day Starmer left office he also miraculously announced a further £11 billion of funding for foreign aid.  From where would that money come? 

The current Burnham government is also retreating from the commitment Britain will spend 3% GDP on defence by 2030, and 3.5% on core defence by 2035.  Yet more smoke and errors?  Yes. Public debt has just this month passed the GDP 3 trillion mark and is now over 100% GDP. It took 100 years to go from GDP 1 trillion to GDP 2 trillion and 6 years to reach GDP 3 trillion. This year the cost of the welfare budget alone will be GDP 330 billion which is the same as the entire tax take or about £1 billion a day!    

With the US no longer THE save haven for lenders and their public debt now over $40 trillion we are heading towards an almighty bond market crash. US debt is driving up the cost of borrowing for Britain which is soaring and such is the power of the bond markets that servicing public debt interest is more important than defending the country.  Debt interest payments are now £130 billion a year over twice the defence budget for 2025-2026 of GDP 65.4 billion. In other words, Britain cannot afford to defend itself let alone defend Norway and fund an advanced expeditionary capability such as the Joint Expeditionary Force vital to that role.  Indeed, such is the impact of public debt on European defence I fear Europe’s indebted states will need to re-structure debt with all the market consequences that will follow. 

Even the 2.6% GDP spent by Britain on defence is spent very badly and includes items that have no place being there (other NATO allies do the same) so that defence expenditure is really a form of creative accounting designed by Special Advisors to hide the blushes of their political masters.  Britain only spends 1.5% GDP on advanced expeditionary conventional capabilities and capacity.  The rest goes on the Nuclear Enterprise.  The under-funding of the ends, ways and means of the British armed forces has gone on for so long that the force is utterly hollowed out.  Worse, Britain has transferred so much of the little munitions it had to Ukraine and despite modest efforts to replenish them the arsenals are depleted.  It will also take time for the British to rebuild their defence, technological and industrial base, which is emaciated and focused on the US market rather than the British.  

The result? Britain’s armed forces are like Britain itself, a hollowed-out shell built on image, past glory and memory rather than requisite fighting power.  This is a tragedy and not just for Britain. A Britain properly and sensibly led would restore its defence leadership at the core of NATO by changing its spending priorities because only a credible NATO can afford Britain a credible defence.  It is doing the exact opposite.  

What does this mean for Norway (and NATO)? With the US stretched thin the world over by China the future defence of Europe, given the threats Europeans are facing on the Northern and Eastern Flanks should ideally be built around two forces: the Bundeswehr and German land power and the Royal Navy and Britain’s maritime-amphibious power, with the Joint Expeditionary Force central to that mission. 

Why?  In the worst case the Chinese will engineer simultaneous crises in the Arctic, North Atlantic, Europe, Middle East and the Pacific to force the Americans to make hard choices.  Britain (and Norway) will then be called upon to lead the defence of the Arctic and North Atlantic. And yet, Britain today is incapable of leading the JEF unless powers such as Norway act to offset British weaknesses, most notably force sustainability.  This is because Britain’s armed forces are particularly lacking at the high end of the conventional war spectrum and need at least £35 billion invested above and beyond current plans to really put the British armed forces on the war footing for the war they would need to fight. 

Do not believe me? Look at the state of the Royal Navy today (the Army and the RAF are little different). At present the ‘RN’ has only 6 destroyers and frigates that are operational, some of which are the hull-expired Type 23 frigates. There will not be the planned 13 such ships available until 2041 at the earliest, and most certainly not the 17 ships that John Healey claimed the Royal Navy had in May. The Royal Navy is deep in the mire of an availability and readiness crisis caused by chronic underfunding and paper planning over many years. 

Of the 5 of 7 in service Astute-class nuclear attack submarines all of them are currently in dockyards. The 4 Vanguard-class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines are all now beyond the operational design life of 25 years by between 2 and 8 years. The four Dreadnought class ‘boomers’ will not enter service until the early 2030s, Probably later.  

Fleet readiness: of 6 advanced Type 45 destroyers, 2 are undergoing deep refit/power improvement programme to correct a catastrophic design error 1 (HMS Duncan) is awaiting PIP, 2 are on sea trials and 1 is sort of operational (HMS Dragon, The plan is to have all the 8 new Type 26 and 5 Type 31 frigates operational by 2035, with 3 new fleet support ships by 2032.  Meanwhile, both Queen Elizabeth-class carriers have had to undergo extensive repairs to their propulsion systems.     

The Type 23 frigates are a metaphor for the worse crisis in Britain’s armed forces in my lifetime and the worst crisis faced by the Royal Navy since Samuel Pepys was Comptroller of the Navy in the Seventeenth Century. The Lloyd's registry of naval ships has since 2000 certified Royal Navy ships as fit for sea service.  However, because an uncertified ship imposes liability London and Lloyds has refused to certify Type 23s the RN has been forced to scrap Type 23 with utterly worn-out hulls far earlier than planned because the cost of fixing them would be prohibitive. 

Worse, the Defence Investment Plan cut the next generation Type 83 destroyer and Type 32 frigates for fewer and cheaper platforms to be replaced by unmanned vessels as part of the so-called Hybrid Navy, partly to offset the chronic crewing problems the Royal Navy faces.  

Yes, Norway, you will eventually get your 5 Type 26 frigates but I cannot say when.  Ask the Australians who are increasingly concerned the UK will be unable to deliver the planned SSN Aukus

My advice to is this? Trust the British to a point but have a Plan B – a Nordic Porcupine defence that would make you, the Finns, Swedes and Danes a very prickly adversary for the Russians. The British people will always be willing to defend its friends in Norway but the British Establishment is far less trustworthy.  This is in part because they seem unable or unwilling to defend the British and in part because the epidemic of young and ambitious Special Advisors with which ministers surround themselves prevents the professional civil service form speaking truth to power.  

Britain?  Britain today is not simply a Potemkin Village, it is a Potemkin state with a Potemkin military full of Bonzai capabilities - a little bit of everything but not much of anything.  A state that can neither project the power contemporary defence demands nor protect the people or the critical infrastructures without which defence cannot start. Our enemies know that.  

Hanna Arendt once said that politicians do not just lie, they remake reality. It is not just that politicians, and indeed bureaucrats remake reality, they also choose reality and today they choose the appearance of economic and social security above national security and the defence of the realm. They gambled on Globalisation and lost and now they want to hide the consequences of this profound failure of policy from the people. Now, real reality is back.  And it bites! Bites hard. Sadly, we British have few teeth and the British people must live with the added risk that such failure imposes on them. 

Julian Lindley-French