Former Nato chief to say UK’s national security ‘in peril’

Britain’s defences are being quietly dismantled from the inside, and one of the most senior figures in the history of Western security is no longer willing to stay quiet about it.

Lord George Robertson, the former Secretary-General of Nato and one-time Defence Secretary under Tony Blair, is set to deliver a blistering assessment of the UK’s current security posture. His central argument is blunt: the country’s national security is in peril, and the people responsible aren’t foreign adversaries. They’re sitting in the Treasury.

Robertson is expected to accuse what he calls “non-military experts in the Treasury” of committing “vandalism” against Britain’s defence capabilities. It’s a remarkable choice of word. Vandalism suggests not incompetence, but wilful destruction, the kind of damage that’s easy to inflict and very hard to undo.

The timing couldn’t be more loaded. Defence spending has been a political football for years, but the pressure to increase it has never felt more urgent. Russia’s war in Ukraine has ground into its third year, Nato allies are being strong-armed by Washington into hitting the 2% GDP target, and the UK’s armed forces have been stretched thin by decades of cuts that always seemed, at the time, perfectly reasonable on a spreadsheet.

That’s precisely Robertson’s point. The people making these decisions are doing so through a financial lens, not a strategic one. When you’re weighing up the cost of a new frigate against a hospital waiting list, the frigate loses every time. But those trade-offs have consequences that don’t show up in a quarterly report.

“The erosion of capability is cumulative,” one former defence official noted earlier this year. “You don’t notice it until the moment you actually need it.”

Robertson has the credibility to make this argument stick. He was at the table when Article 5 was invoked for the first and only time in Nato’s history, after the September 11 attacks. He knows what collective defence actually looks like under pressure.

The question now is whether anyone in government is listening, or whether another distinguished speech will simply be filed away alongside all the others.