I wrote a piece on the Starmer Administration walking away from the EU’s defence funding programme. Here are the links, I used and didn’t. …
Links
- The EU reports that, EU and UK conclude security and defence partnership mostly used for the picture.
- The EU version of the “Reset Communique” EU-UK summit-2025-outcome-documents
- Minister Nick Thomas Symond’s speech at the UK-EU parliamentary partnership assembly plenary, 17-November
- The Commission on SAFE funding, i.e. by ECB bonfs
- UK excluded from €150bn EU defence deal from EuroWeekly News.
What I can’t understand is whether, under SAFE the UK might have used EU funds to buy Archer or Boxer, or even pay for part of the AJAX or Challenger 3 programmes, since all these army vehicles either have EU member state components or are sourced from EU member states.
Days later it was announced that Canada was joining SAFE for €10m. Why was the Canadian entry fee so much less than that of the UK? Google Gemini states that the argument was about money but the fact that the UK was looking for free money to subsidise Europe’s largest arms manufacturer for a trivial contribution didn’t help. The Commission argued that €6.5bn was a fair request given the size of the the UK economy, the size of the UK arms industry, what the EU was likely to buy, and the fact is that the scheme was aimed at safeguard EU jobs and factories and building its industrial capability. Canada is smaller, and has less to sell. (It’s another example of the Labour Government not getting the citizenship dimension of the EU.)
Canada, may also supplement its fleet of F35s with Sweden’s Gripen where as the UK has agreed to buy more F35s. (This may have been a factor.) AFAIK the decision is not yet taken, but the Swedes will licence the manufacture of the Gripen and thus the jobs will be in Canada. 1/1/2026
Image Credit (c) NATO, used under CC NATO BY