Nato\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, spoke with the Press Association following meetings with Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting Photograph: The Ditchley Foundation\/PAView image in fullscreenNato\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, spoke with the Press Association following meetings with Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting Photograph: The Ditchley Foundation\/PANato head: Britain must show \u2018credible path\u2019 of annual defence budget increasesMark Rutte said Britain will need to steadily increase defence spending to meet Nato target of 3.5% of GDP by 2035Britain needs to show \u201ca credible path\u201d of annual increases in its defence budgets to meet a Nato target of spending nearly \u00a330bn more on the military by the middle of the next decade, the head of the alliance said on Thursday.Mark Rutte, Nato\u2019s secretary general, said that Britain could not wait until just before 2035 to lift defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, in an unusually pointed intervention a day after he met prime minister Andy Burnham.In an interview with the Press Association, he also said the UK could not wait until 2035 to make a final leap. \u201cAnd that is why you need a credible path towards that 3.5%, and yearly increments.\u201dThe alliance\u2019s secretary general, a former Dutch prime minister, made similar remarks to the BBC, where he said that the UK understood that the target could not be met \u201cin one go in 2034\u201d and that it would have to be achieved gradually.Earlier on Thursday, Rutte met with Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, and Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary. He saw Burnham on Wednesday, at a business park in Didcot, and also met representatives from the defence industry.Keir Starmer signed the UK up to a Nato-wide target of increasing defence spending to 3.5% of GDP in the summer of 2025, under pressure from the US president, Donald Trump. The figure has since been endorsed by Burnham and his chancellor, former defence secretary John Healey.Current spending plans, covering until 2028\/9, show defence spending levelling off at 2.7%, nearly \u00a330bn below the ultimate target, raising the question of how it would be achieved after the next general election. It is unclear if taxes or borrowing would have to rise, or other government spending cuts.Healey resigned as defence minister in June because Starmer would not commit to lifting defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030.<\/p>\n
At the time Healey said Labour needed to set \u201ca clear path\u201d to meet the Nato commitment, similar language to that used by Rutte in his interviews.But since then Healey and Burnham have avoided committing to the 3% by the end of the decade. Decisions on future spending are likely to be left to the next government spending review due next year, prompting the Nato leader to engage in public lobbying on his trip to Britain.Rutte said he was certain the Burnham government remained behind the ultimate goal and the need to increase defence spending gradually. \u201cI am absolutely confident that when it comes to the yearly increments, they totally take it and accept it, that they have to be there,\u201d he told the BBC.\u201cThere has to be a credible path. What that credible path exactly will be, we will see with the spending review next year,\u201d Rutte added.A day earlier, Rutte gave a speech to at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, in which he warned that the 32 country military alliance faced \u201cthe most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation\u201d with wars in Ukraine, the Middle East coming at time of rising state competition.Nato needed \u201cmore UK and more Europe\u201d, he added, to take up the slack as the US reduces its military commitment to the alliance. Trump has long argued that the UK and Europe should match US levels of defence spending and take the lead in defending the continent from Russia aggression.Explore more on these topicsNatoMark RutteAndy BurnhamEd MilibandWes StreetingnewsShareReuse this content<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nato\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, spoke with the Press Association following meetings with Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting Photograph: The Ditchley Foundation\/PAView image in fullscreenNato\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, spoke with the Press Association following\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}