Kier Starmer wants us 'war ready' but he's a bit late.

Today, Keir Starmer pledged to raise Britain’s defence spending to 3% of GDP, up from its current level of 2.5%.  But what does that even mean? It’s a number tossed around like a badge of honour, as if percentages fight wars and not people. While nurses queue at food banks and schools crumble under RAAC and rot, Starmer’s big idea is to shovel billions more into the military-industrial complex.  More hardware, more headlines, and more hollow posturing dressed up as statesmanship. 

Starmer’s new hawkish posture isn’t just a tonal shift, it’s a full-blown audition to be Washington’s favourite poodle. He’s pledged unwavering support for NATO, reaffirmed the UK’s so-called ‘nuclear deterrent’ and promised to meet every demand of the defence lobby with open arms and open chequebooks. This is a Labour leader who now talks like a Cold Warrior, reciting lines about ‘deterrence’ and ‘readiness’ while waving through multi-billion-pound defence contracts with the same urgency the public has been begging for in the NHS, housing, or public sector pay. It’s not peacekeeping: it’s sabre-rattling in a tailored suit. 

And he’s not ready.  Not even close.  

But there’s an elephant in the room.  That is that there’s no point preparing for a new cold war, because World War III has already started.  

We can’t prepare ourselves for a coming war because it is already here. No one declared it on the BBC: No sirens. No Churchillian speech. Just a slow, grey sludge of escalation, cyberattacks, proxy wars, energy sabotage, hybrid warfare and drone strikes happening. But make no mistake. This is a world war. 

How do we know it’s a World War. Well let’s count the fronts: 

• Ukraine: The epicentre. Russia isn’t just at war with Kyiv. It’s at war with NATO, with Western logistics, with the global financial order. British missiles, US satellites, German tanks, it’s all in there.  Russia started it and we’ve quite rightly supported Ukraine, but once you get involved in something like this it’s almost impossible to walk away from until it’s reached its conclusion.
• Middle East: Gaza is a flashpoint, but the chessboard is bigger. The Red Sea shipping routes are a warzone. Israel and Iran are testing lines. The US and UK are bombing Yemen like it’s 2003 again. .
• Africa: Russian mercenaries operate in Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic. China plays infrastructure kingmaker while the West throws money and drones.
• Asia-Pacific: Taiwan, South China Sea, Japan’s remilitarisation. Every US base from Guam to Darwin is gearing up for a ‘future conflict’
• Cyberspace: Every bank, data centre, hospital system is under constant attack. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—poking, prodding, penetrating systems without firing a single bullet.
• Information: Every bot farm, TikTok psyop, deepfake, and news algorithm pushing division.

These are theatres.  These are battlefields and the IT theatre is textbook psychological warfare.  It’s easy and comfortable not to think of this as a war because we don’t feel It... yet  It’s Not a War of Bombs raining down on Britain… yet. It’s a War of Infrastructure.  In World War II the Blitz hit London in the gut. This war hits you in the bandwidth. 

• It’s the supermarket shelves half-stocked because a drone hit a Red Sea ship.
• It’s the NHS IT system glitching because of a cyberattack from Belarus.
• It’s your heating bill tripled because a pipeline under the Baltic was sabotaged.

And still we scroll.  And still they say, “All is well". Britain Is Sleepwalking While Sitting on a Target. Starmer says we need to be ‘war ready,’ but where’s the shelter for civilians?

Where’s the plan for blackouts, supply shocks, civil unrest? We’re acting like it's 2006, but the world’s burning like it's 1937. Our leaders don’t dare say the words ‘World War III’ because it would mean admitting they’re already losing it. That it didn’t start with a bang. It started with a series of ‘limited’ actions, ‘unofficial’ invasions and ‘grey zone’ activities, all opaquely surrounded in plausible deniability. But grey zone or not, it’s real. It’s now.  And it’s global. We need to stop thinking the next world war will look like the last.

• It won't be men in trenches, it’ll be data centres in Slough going dark.
• It won’t be gas masks on the Tube, it’ll be a deepfake that starts a riot.
• It won’t be a mushroom cloud (at first): it’ll be energy shortages, crop failures and collapsed infrastructure sold as 'cost of living' 

If you are sceptical about Sir Kier’s announcement today then you're absolutely right to be. It's not even nearly enough to deal with the situation we find ourselves in.  We need to raise the alarm. What exactly does a 3% defence budget actually mean in the context of Starmer’s increasingly hawkish posturing.  If the UK is supposedly preparing for the threat of direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed power like Russia or China, then simply throwing more cash at military contractors and upping our NATO contributions doesn't even scratch the surface of actual civil preparedness.  So if we are at war we are hopelessly unprepared.  

There are three uncomfortable truths to consider: 

3% of GDP Won’t Magically Stop a Missile 

Starmer’s pledge to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP might sound bold, but: 

• It's a figure that plays well with NATO hardliners and the US military-industrial complex.
• It won't significantly alter our nuclear deterrent (which is Trident and already funded separately).
• It won’t defend civilians. There’s no current provision in the UK for large-scale civil defence, emergency infrastructure, or domestic resilience beyond vague COBRA briefings and a few government pamphlets.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWcgF4Wwog

We Have No Bomb Shelter Network Anymore 

During the Cold War, Britain had the Protect and Survive doctrine and rudimentary public shelter planning. That was all dismantled in the 1990s. Today: 

• No national programme exists for bomb shelters.
• Most hospitals, schools, and homes are completely unprotected.
• There’s no public education or infrastructure for nuclear preparedness, unlike countries such as Finland or Switzerland, which do maintain shelter programmes.

So if Starmer is truly worried about ‘being war ready’, where’s the civilian plan? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=922Db-kztC0

The Internet will be a key battlefield 

The Thames Valley Data Corridor (Slough, Reading, West London) is among the most data-dense locations in Europe. If the UK were hit in a first-strike cyber-physical attack, this area: 

• Would be a prime target to cripple finance, communications, and AI infrastructure.
• Houses cloud services for the NHS, the Home Office, and major banks.
• Is completely exposed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVCC5SoRdwU

If the UK needs to rely on electronic warfare and a cloud-based infrastructure, then there’s a real operational vulnerability here.  While Starmer is concentrating on counterforce measure, he needs to also concetrate on countervalue and civil defence measures. Even if the bombs don’t drop, if Starmer was serious, we’d be seeing: 

• A national resilience programme including civilian bomb shelters, evacuation planning, and radiation medicine stockpiles.
• Hardening of critical infrastructure: data centres, power grids, telecoms.
• Emergency broadcast upgrades (remember when we had proper sirens, not just a mobile app test once a year?)
• Public education about emergency preparedness, fallout, and nuclear protocols.

But instead, it’s mostly performative: 3% GDP = we’re strong. That’s a slogan, not a strategy. 

Our Government is talking like hawks but doing absolutely nothing to protect us. If Russia really was preparing a strike, the UK public would be hopelessly exposed, not because we lack soldiers, but because our government’s too cowardly to talk about what war with a nuclear power actually means. And if Starmer wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with NATO generals, then he better start thinking like it's 1962 and build the bunkers. 

Now I wouldn’t want to do the Government’s job for it but the speech this morning was piss poor. Yes, half a dozen more nuclear subs might create a deterrent, but a deterrent is used after a first strike and we don't even want to think of the madness of ordering a first strike. If I was writing his scripts for him or was in one of his vanilla focus groups I would have released a speech on national resilience: 

It would say that in the face of mounting global instability, ranging from the war in Ukraine, cyber-hybrid threats, to nuclear posturing by hostile states, the UK must urgently modernise its civil defence infrastructure. As it stands, the British public has zero protection against nuclear, chemical, biological, or high-impact conventional attack. 

The Government would need to propose the Civil Defence Shelter Initiative (CDSI), a 10-year national programme to: 

• Construct public and semi-public bomb/fallout shelters
• Retrofit key infrastructure with blast-resistant features
• Educate and equip the public for civil emergencies
• Harden critical digital infrastructure in target zones (e.g., Slough, Docklands, Salford, etc.)

It would need to be phased and we simply don' know how much time we have so it would also need to be prioritised:

Phase 1: Emergency Shelter Network (Years 1–3) Objective: Build a baseline network of accessible shelters covering high-density population centres.Locations: 

• London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Cardiff, Newcastle
• Strategic additions in proximity to data infrastructure (Slough, Reading), nuclear bases (Faslane, Devonport), and power facilities

Shelter Specs: 

• Reinforced concrete bunkers capable of resisting 1.5 bar overpressure (suitable for moderate blast zones)
• Independent air filtration (NBC-rated)
• Water tanks, sanitation pods, and 72-hour food supply
• Capacity: 200–1,000 people per shelter, mixed use (civic, school, rail, hospital adjuncts)

Cost Estimate: £10bn over 3 years 

Comparable Projects: Swiss “Projet Réduit”, Israeli MAMADs, Cold War UK RSGs 

Phase 2: Retrofit and Protect (Years 3–7) Objective: Integrate shelter spaces into existing infrastructure. 

• Underground car parks → dual-use shelters
• Tube stations → modernised, re-equipped for lockdown use
• School basements & university campuses → reinforced and supplied
• Hospitals → include subterranean emergency wards with radiation shielding
• Data centres → hardened physical perimeter and redundant air-gapped backups

Cost Estimate: £15b 

Benefit: Multi-purpose resilience (not just war, but pandemics, floods, blackouts) 

Phase 3: Civil Preparedness and Training (Years 1–10) Objective: Rebuild public knowledge and institutional muscle memory. 

• Launch ‘Protect and Prepare 2030’ public campaign
• Train 10,000 Civil Resilience Wardens (CRWs) per region
• Modernise National Alert System (sirens, cell broadcast, FM takeover)
• Stockpile potassium iodide pills, trauma kits, water purification tablets

 Cost Estimate: £2.5bn 

Institutional Partner: British Red Cross, Territorial Army Reserve, St John Ambulance

Digital Infrastructure Hardening (Concurrent).  This would need to focus on areas like: 

• Slough, Reading, West London (data corridor)
• Docklands (financial nerve centre)
• Salford Quays (media & cloud HQs)
• Newcastle & Hull (communications hubs)

 Measures: 

• EMP shielding for data centres
• Physical perimeter enforcement
• Air-gapped offline recovery systems
• Decentralised back-up clusters

Cost Estimate: £3bn 

Lead Agencies: GCHQ, MoD, DSIT 

Total Cost: £30.5bn over 10 years Equivalent to ~0.1% of GDP annually

Something like this would be equivalent to one year of HS2, or 18% of annual UK defence budget.  A nation ‘ready for war’ cannot only arm soldiers and buy F-35s and subs. In the 21st century, where high-intensity conflict could escalate with hours' notice, Britain needs a domestic resilience strategy grounded in realism, not fantasy. 

Of course this is expensive but wars don't come cheap.  You don’t raise defence spending to this level, even to 3% of GDP without finding tens of billions from somewhere.  So who’s going to pay?  Will the billionaires bankroll the bombs?  Will the non-doms chip in for the cyberwarfare division?  Of course not. Starmer hasn’t said a word about taxing the rich, closing loopholes, or clamping down on offshore havens. If anything, he’s allergic to the very idea.  But if we are truly in a war if then we need wartime economics, emergency measures that tax extreme wealth, cap capital flight, and bring offshore assets under democratic control. Because if ordinary people are expected to sacrifice, the oligarch class shouldn’t get to sit this one out in Monaco or Mayfair.

Whether it's the next pandemic, a blackout, a chemical incident or a Russian missile, the British public deserves more than platitudes and a Union Jack emoji. They deserve shelter, protection, and a government that takes our existential risk seriously. 

This is a wartime crisis and Keir Starmer isn’t making Britain ‘war ready’. He’s just making Britain more of a target than we actually were.  Building submarines and infrastructure can’t be done overnight and we are already on the backfoot. We are exposed at one of the most dangerous times in human history.  And worse than that, he’s leaving the public naked while pretending he’s Churchill with a spreadsheet. Today, Starmer stood behind a podium and promised to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP. The press dutifully nodded. The generals clapped. The arms dealers uncorked the champagne. And what did the British people get? 

• No bomb shelters. 
• No civilian defence. 
• No hardening of schools, hospitals, or infrastructure. 
• Not even a fucking iodine tablet. 

Let’s call this what it is: a cosplay war economy for the Atlanticist elite and in a wartime situation this is unforgivable.  Starmer’s 3% pledge is a giant, taxpayer-funded offering to Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, while our actual communities are left wide open. When the war goes hot, which it will, our grand strategy seems to be: Hope London isn’t home that day. 

Because let’s not kid ourselves. Britain’s cities, especially London, Salford, Glasgow, and the Slough-Reading tech corridor, would be first in line for retaliation. We are a surveillance-state satellite of the US, and our data centres, ports, and power stations are naked. Yet what does Starmer offer in return? 

• No public shelter network.
• No civil defence drills.
• No proper communications resilience.
• No effort to educate or protect the people he’s supposedly making ‘war ready’

^{Protect and survive, the Government policy of the early 1980's was hopelessly inadequate, but even this is more than what we have now.} 

Just more jets, more war games, more budgetary fetishism. All of it designed to please Washington, and none of it designed to keep you or your kids alive. This isn’t leadership. It’s strategic cosplay for the defence lobby. It’s war as PR.  Death as political branding. 

Whether he wanted to be or not, and whether we wanted him to be or not, he is our de facto war leader and he needs to up his fucking game.  He’s not taking this at all seriously. If he truly understood our position, if he comprehended we are in the phoney war stage of global war, he'd be in a hard hat breaking ground on bunkers, not prancing around a NATO conference in a tailored suit talking about ‘deterrence’ like he’s reading lines from a West Wing episode. 

To be clear the last thing I want is to live through World War III and I sincerely hope I am wrong about this.  I would happily take the criticism for being way off the mark if I was, but sadly the world is not the place we want or need it to be and I really do think we're in a dark and frightening place.  

As for Starmer, he’s not preparing us for war.  He’s preparing us for failure. So next time he talks about defence, ask your MP this: “Where’s my shelter? Where’s my iodine pill? Where’s the plan for my kids?”  Because if Starmer and the Government can’t answer that, then they're not defending Britain.  They're just painting a target on it. 

The world has gone mad. If you enjoyed reading this, please feel free to look at the rest of the blogs on www.TetleysTLDR.com. They're free to view, there's no paywall, they aren't monetised and I won't ask you to buy me a coffee. Also please free to share anything you find of interest, we only get the message out if people are aware of it. Just a leftie, standing in front of another leftie, asking to be read. All the best, Tetley