Andy Burnham<\/a> \u2013 but argued that the military and financial effort must continue into the future.<\/p>\n\u201cIt is essential that your armed forces continue to provide the hard power Nato needs,\u201d Rutte said in a speech to a specialist audience at Ditchley Park, a wartime retreat used by Winston Churchill in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n
It was a plea for the UK to make progress towards an alliance-wide target demanded by Donald Trump of spending 3.5% of GDP by 2035, around \u00a330bn in real terms, money that has to be found from extra taxation, borrowing or reducing other spending.<\/p>\n
Britain has so far only budgeted to increase defence spending to 2.7% of GDP by the end of the next decade. Short-term financial pressures have meant that the army has been told to stop non-essential training by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Chancellor John Healey resigned as defence secretary from Keir Starmer\u2019s government in June because the former prime minister would not commit to 3% by 2030, arguing that it would require too great a step up in the next decade.<\/p>\n
But Healey refused to recommit to the interim target when he was appointed to the Treasury by Burnham a month later, raising questions that the new government was backloading spending increases until after the next election.<\/p>\n
Rutte said that he had discussed Britain\u2019s \u201cNato commitments\u201d when he had met Burnham at a science business park in Oxford earlier on Wednesday, without offering any details, in the first one-on-one meeting between the two.<\/p>\n
Prior to that meeting, Burnham acknowledged that he had replaced Starmer, but insisted that there was \u201cnever any change in the UK\u2019s unwavering commitment to Nato and our Nato obligations\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Nato chief, a former Dutch prime minister, said that many in Europe had made the \u201ccasual assumption\u201d that the US would \u201calways provide most of the muscle and pick up the bill, no matter what\u201d until Trump returned to the White House.<\/p>\n
Instead, he noted that during a summit in The Hague in 2025, the UK and other alliance members had agreed to increase their own defence spending to match US levels, in response to Trump\u2019s demand that Europe take the lead in defending the continent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need more UK and more Europe in the alliance,\u201d Rutte said, because Nato \u201cfaces the most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation\u201d with a return to wars in Europe and the Middle East, and wider geopolitical uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Citing \u201cRussia and its war against Ukraine, terrorism, Iran and the tectonic shifts of global geopolitical competition\u201d, Rutte argued that the UK and Europe needed to invest more, because otherwise \u201cour collective defence will not be credible\u201d.<\/p>\n
Britain, he said, had \u201ca central role in building this stronger Europe in a stronger Nato\u201d and noted that the UK was spending billions to upgrade the Trident nuclear deterrent, which is pledged to the defence of Nato members.<\/p>\n
The UK is also gradually upgrading its conventional forces, though the UK\u2019s overall defence spending, long the second largest in the alliance, is now behind Germany. By 2029, Berlin\u2019s military budgets are on track to be twice that of the UK.<\/p>\n
The UK was \u201cleading the pushback\u201d against a Russian campaign of provocation and sabotage across Europe, Rutte said, and that the UK had been \u201ca good friend to Ukraine\u201d. Britain spends \u00a33bn a year supporting Ukraine with weapons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nato needs \u201cmore UK and more Europe\u201d to deal with the most dangerous security environment faced by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-772895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}