It will surely rankle in many quarters that Keir Starmer appears to have folded to Emmanuel Macron’s absurd demand that British involvement in the EU’s rearmament effort be conditional on French access to our fishing waters.

But on purely economic terms, it was a hard-headed decision. Fishing is very important to specific parts of the UK, but overall defence exports are worth eight and a half times as much as fisheries exports (£14.5 billion vs £1.7 billion), and British defence firms are genuine world leaders.

Ursula von der Leyen’s ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 proposal represents a pot of up to €800 billion in European defence spending; it would be foolish not to try and get a slice of that pie. How much of it we get is another question. France is naturally pushing a “buy European” policy (which means in practice, for the most part, “buy French”), and a theoretically open market does not necessarily mean an actually open one.

On this, unlike fishing, British politicians have no right to complain: the UK has long reserved defence contracts for domestic firms, and just this week BAE Systems announced plans to expand production of explosives and propellants to reduce reliance on American and, yes, French imports.

Such a policy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, guaranteeing demand supports British armaments and aerospace companies, keeping manufacturing and skills in this country. The stand-out example is Barrow, where the UK now always has a nuclear submarine under construction.

On the other hand, it steeply increases costs. In 2019 the Ministry of Defence scrapped an international tender for fleet-support ships against the wishes of the Royal Navy, which believed they could be constructed more cheaply overseas. And while there are many factors behind the UK’s woeful track record of defence procurement, it would not be surprising if restricting competition to a very limited pool of British firms has made those companies complacent.

As such, there is no automatic link between improving market conditions for British defence manufacturers and repairing the condition of our own military. The one is necessary for the other, in current political conditions, but not sufficient.

One area that will certainly be a boon is munitions production. A particularly hard lesson of the Russo-Ukranian War has been that Western output of the most basic materiel — bullets and artillery shells — is woefully short of the demands of a high-intensity conventional war. Even with its European and American allies digging into stocks that directly undermine their own military preparedness, Ukrainian units are reportedly having to ration ammunition, and face a lethal asymmetry with Russian fires. (For all the smug talk about the relatively small size of the Russian economy, it has much cheaper production costs and spends 7% of GDP on defence — that adds up.)

If British munitions manufacturing can scale up to meet demand from Kyiv, that latent capacity will also be available to our own Armed Forces, reducing one major limiting factor on any deployment. But fixing other problems in our defence supply chain will require more political will.

Combat experience in the Donbas is teaching Western engineers what they have forgotten since the Second World War: that producing larger volumes of simpler kit, which can be repaired in the field, is more useful than small numbers of state-of-the-art platforms with long and fragile technical support chains. Where the engines on Russian tanks can be repaired on-site by a mechanic, Germany’s vaunted Leopard IIIs depend on a specialist factory hundreds of miles behind the front line.

British defence chiefs and politicians, however, have long prized commissioning the newest and shiniest machines, even at the expense of acquiring fewer and fewer of them and, in the Navy’s case, of never properly fitting them out. That’s a habit they will have to unlearn — either off the battlefield, or on it.

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