Miriam Cates: Britain and Europe are not remotely ready to heed Vance’s wake-up call

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

We are living through something of a geopolitical earthquake. Since 1945, European nations have believed that the might of the American army could be relied upon to guarantee our security in the case of war. Yet Donald Trump has scotched that assumption, making clear that the US is no longer willing to act as the Western guarantor.

In desperation, European leaders, fronted by our own Sir Keir Starmer, have hastily convened a “coalition of the willing” to discuss how Europe can “stand together” against the tyrant Vladimir Putin.   

But Macron, Meloni, Merz et al are utterly deluded if they think that their public display of solidarity for Zelensky and commitments to replace American military support for Ukraine are anything more substantial than warm words. On average, European countries spend just 1.6 per cent of GDP on defence; even a doubling of this sum would see little on-the-ground impact for years.

More importantly, European economies have no headroom for an increase in defence expenditure on this scale. With chronic budget deficits, aging populations, and debts approaching – or exceeding – 100 per cent of GDP, the UK and its EU neighbours are broke. Even if the money could be found to expand our armed forces, just 11 per cent of Gen Z say they would fight for Britain.

The stark reality is that Europe no longer has the military capability, or the self-belief, to defend itself. The Army has a fighting force of fewer than 75 000 personnel, a figure that has halved since 1990, and perhaps fewer than 20,000 of that are actually deployable. We have just 213 challenger tanks and 137 Eurofighter typhoons. French and German forces are similarly depleted.

In contrast, Russia can field around 17,500 tanks, and the Chinese 1900 fighter planes. Iran has an army of nearly one million men. If one of our enemies were to attack today, Europe could not fight. There is no point in pretending otherwise.  

By the end of the 1980s, Western liberal democracy seemed in the ascendant. According to Francis Fukuyama, we were witnessing ‘the end of history.’  Yet in just forty years we have squandered our inheritance, leaving Britain and Europe in greater peril than at any time since 1940. So what happened?

A sound post-war recovery gave way to the social and economic liberalisations, reforms that began to undermine the foundations of our security. Britain continued for a while at least to enjoy the fruits of Western democracy – freedom, prosperity, high levels of social trust – but we became a “cut flower” civilisation, detached from the roots of personal responsibility, sound money, and a common moral framework.

The welfare state, intended as an emergency safety net for the unemployed or acutely unwell, ballooned into a millstone around the neck of the British economy as it removed the connection between family, responsibility, and prosperity. The taxpayer now pays the living costs of over three million people who do not work, and have no requirement to do so; the NHS spends forty per cent of its budget (nearly £80 billion a year) on preventable disease.

If families are responsible for providing for themselves, then there are clear incentives to get married, have children, raise them well, live healthily, and work hard so that you are a benefit to, rather than a drain on, your relatives. Yet if you can survive on benefits at no cost to your loved ones, receive free healthcare even if you cause your own sickness, and claim a pension even if you haven’t replenished the system by raising children of your own, then what is the incentive to live responsibly?

The welfare state had good intentions. But it has undermined the culture of duty and personal responsibility that underpinned British prosperity. The spiraling costs of pensions, healthcare, and social security benefits have become an unaffordable indulgence, and have prevented us from investing in our defence.

Welfarism has also made Britain soft; the reaction to the cuts to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance demonstrates how we are unwilling to countenance any short-term hardship for the long-term good of the nation.

Another important principle that was jettisoned in the 1970s was the idea that we should live within our means. Changes to lending rules, globalization, and commercialization transformed us from citizens to consumers. British households – and the government – began to rack up debt.In the 1980s, the household debt to GDP ratio was 30 per cent; by 2016 it had reached 80 per cent. 

Public sector borrowing has also ballooned;i nterest repayments alone cost the taxpayer £100bn a year, yet debt is projected to rise to 280 per cent of GDP by 2070. Our ‘prosperity’ is not real: we are robbing from the future to pay for the present. 

Debt-fueled asset inflation priced young people out of home ownership, and this combined with social liberalisations such as abortion and easy divorce led to falling marriage and fertility rates. An economy is nothing without enough people to replenish it, yet since the 1970s birth rates have been well below what is required for replacement.

In the early 1960s, over 900,000 babies were born each year in Britain. In 2023, there were fewer than 600,000 births. An epidemic of fatherlessness has caused a crisis in masculinity; a catastrophic development given that competent, conscientious young men are vital to a nation’s security.

And we took the hard-won benefits of Western democracy like tolerance, compassion, liberty, and care for creation and disconnected them from their Judeo-Christian moral foundation, re-branding them into vacuous ‘British values’. The doctrines that derived from these (multiculturalism, social liberalism, eco-zealotry, and critical social justice theories) have undermined social cohesion and national identity.

Meanwhile the ongoing arrival of thousands of unvetted foreigners on small boats, and the use of ‘human rights’  protections to prevent the deportation of hardened foreign criminals, demonstrate that we have even given up on domestic security.

The sad story of British and Western European decline reminds me of the parable of the Prodigal Son. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the story of a young man who, though his father is still alive, takes his inheritance and leaves home to squander it in reckless living. When a famine strikes, he becomes destitute. The parable could be rewritten for 21st century Britain.

“Not long after that, Britain got together all that she had, set off for a lifestyle of “buy now pay later” and squandered her inheritance in irresponsible living. 14 After she had spent everything, there were severe shortages brought on by eye watering indebtedness and she began to be in need. 15 So she went and hired herself out to her enemies – through mass immigration and reliance on foreign goods and money – who stripped her of everything she had left in terms of assets, security and national identity.”

We have squandered our inheritance. We have forgotten what is good and true and pursued instead those things that we wish to be good and true but are not.

We might want it to be true that the state can afford to provide pensions and welfare as well as a credible military force, but it can’t. We might want it to be true that Putin can be defeated, and America will protect us, but it isn’t. We might want it to be true that men can be women, culture doesn’t matter, and family structure is irrelevant, but these are lies.

We may wish to think that renewable energy can be cheap and reliable, but it is not. We might sincerely believe that ‘diversity is our strength” but the opposite is true. We might think we can borrow our way to prosperity, but we can’t.

Amongst all Western politicians, JD Vance stands out as perhaps the only leader who both understands the causes of our decline and is willing to call it out. In his Munich speech, Vance had some harsh words for Europeans:

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values… the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.”

Can Europe recover? In his recent speech to the ARC conference in London, philosopher Os Guinness gave the hope that collapse is not inevitable, using the Biblical narrative of ‘exile and return’ as a more optimistic alternative to ‘decline and fall’. If Britain and Western Europe is willing to acknowledge its failures – if, like the Prodigal Son, we are humble enough to return ‘home’ to our sound foundational principles of sound money, personal responsibility and shared morality – then there is still hope.

But while our political leaders are more interested in expressing outrage about Trump’s tone of voice than in acknowledging the reality of our weakness, ‘home’ seems a long way off.