On Saturday, Kemi Badenoch used her address to the London Defence Conference to launch a blistering attack on Britain’s lack of military preparedness under the current Labour government. The Tory leader quoted a senior military commander, General Richard Barrons, who argued last month that Britain’s armed forces could at best hope to take a small market town in a modern conflict scenario.

Badenoch said that a future Tory government would increase defence spending beyond the current 3% and find £17 billion from other priorities, such as research into Net Zero, to launch a fund backing the nation’s defence supply chains. She also promised to cut back supply-side constraints on the defence-industrial sector, including energy prices, red tape and ESG requirements.

The Conservative leader is right to highlight the gulf between Keir Starmer’s rhetoric and actions on defence, and her own proposals were broadly reasonable and well-evidenced. Yet this vision still rings hollow in terms of how big a change rearmament would actually be.

For a start, Badenoch doesn’t seem to recognise that her new defence spending target is wholly inadequate for the task of reversing 35 years of complacency on the issue. When it finally started dawning on Britain’s leaders that war was on the cards in the mid-Thirties, they began spending more than double that figure, arguably starting from a far higher base than today.

Cutting costs associated with Net Zero is important, but vast damage has already been done. This isn’t so much about Britain’s high-tech defence sector itself, which remains competitive, but instead the unglamorous basic industries that keep everything else working: steelmaking, oil refining, chemicals, fertilisers and materials production. Neglecting these means that ramping up other areas of production will be very difficult, and a nation contemplating the prospect of attritional war cannot hope to sustain itself on imports. That’s especially true given the extent to which Britain’s navy has been hollowed out. Even with the right energy and deregulation policies, the task of rebuilding basic industrial capacity is the work of an entire generation, if not longer.

Beyond the physical requirements, there is also the issue of national morale and sense of purpose. Britain’s institutions, including the armed forces, appear to be bound up in proceduralism that is directed toward priorities unrelated to their core objectives. This is in order to fulfil obligations set out in reams of quasi-constitutional legislation, from the Public Sector Equality Duty to the Climate Change Act. Our new elites view the world in a distinctly post-national manner that is at odds with much of public opinion. The patriotic working-class communities that traditionally supplied the bulk of the country’s fighting men are disillusioned with the direction in which Britain has travelled in recent decades, another factor in the declining numbers of young people enlisting for military service.

Preparing Britain for a major war would require changing almost everything about the way the country has been run since 1990. Most importantly, it would require reorienting huge amounts of spending from health and welfare towards defence. Labour won’t do this, and Badenoch is right to point out that Starmer’s posturing lacks credibility. In an ideal world, she might be up for some of the challenges of changing the country along these lines. But it would entail a degree of radicalism the Conservatives have not displayed in a very long time indeed.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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