Will the UK’s next prime minister finally have a ‘national conversation’ on defence?

The Defence Investment Plan recommits the UK to a national conversation on defence and security. The failure to deliver one so far undermines public trust and leaves the UK vulnerable to hybrid threats.

Expert comment

Published 3 July 2026 — 4 minute READ

Image — Prime Minister Keir Starmer and then-Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham at Old Trafford on 12 May 2024 in Manchester, England. Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images.

Robin Potter

Academy Associate, UK in the World Programme

Keir Starmer has released the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which sets out the UK’s military spending plans, ahead of the NATO summit next week. The DIP also contains a commitment to a ‘national conversation campaign on defence and security’. 

However, this plan for a ‘national conversation’ was already adopted by Starmer’s government in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of 2025. The conversation was to focus on the rationale for investing more in defence, the role of the public in support of national security and resilience, and countering misinformation. 

The review recommended it take the form of a ‘two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends’. This has not yet happened. 

Meanwhile, intelligence services have warned that Russian sabotage, hostile reconnaissance, cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns are increasingly directed at the UK, a country viewed as ‘enemy number one’ and a ‘soft target’. The first step in countering these ‘hybrid’ attacks targeting the UK’s political stability is for a new prime minister to inform the public and build a societal response. 

Building trust and consent

The commitment from the Starmer government in 2025 reflects UK and NATO doctrine, which emphasize the ‘central proactive element’ of strategic communications in countering hybrid threats. Increased public awareness can spur civil society action to recognise hybrid threats and address vulnerabilities, acting as a deterrence by denying or reducing the impact of such threats. 

However, the UK government faces a strategic challenge: low public trust. According to 2024 polling, the UK government is one of the least trusted by the public among OECD countries. A ‘national conversation’ could be an important way to improve the public’s trust in the government. 

Allowing the public to feel they are part of a dialogue with authorities and including them in decision-making can build long-term public trust. Communications can foster cohesion through values-led narratives which promote civic unity. 

Withholding information on threats can negatively impact public confidence.

Sharing more about security also requires government to trust the public. The UK government has been accused of a ‘Stalinist’ culture of excessive official secrecy, with information either not shared due to fear of public and media panic, or a desire to control the narrative of the threat. 

Withholding information on threats can however negatively impact public confidence, especially if the British public perceives allied governments or independent media as offering greater candour than official UK sources.  

In turn, a national conversation that builds trust and explains the level of threat facing the UK will help the government to secure public approval for increased defence spending as outlined in the DIP. This is vital considering that higher defence spending generally requires a combination of cuts elsewhere, tax rises, or borrowing – all options that could prove unpopular with the public if the government doesn’t better explain and justify its decisions. 

What role should the public play?

A key element of the conversation is to engage the public in supporting national security and resilience. To send a clear demand signal to society through outreach activities, the government must first organize and articulate policy on the public’s role.

According to Dr Fiona Hill, a co-author of the SDR, civil aid organizations currently feel ‘there is no green light from above’ and ‘a sense of inaction’ in planning to support emergency responses. While the government is researching policy options on aspects of societal resilience, there appears to be limited political direction or ownership with no single minister responsible. 

The SDR also recommended the conversation should support ‘efforts to counter threats to information integrity as a critical component of national cohesion’. This reflects an online information ecosystem which is becoming easier to manipulate, with impacts offline. Violent disorder has occurred every summer since 2024, fuelled in part by misinformation on platforms including Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Facebook.

Possible calls to action might include asking the broader public to engage in media literacy initiatives, such as those available in libraries and online, for example via civic organizations in Finland and Sweden. 

Given the potential of misinformation to cause polarization and destabilization, the UK government has taken some limited steps to improve resilience, but actions on media literacy are focussed on parents and limited to a government campaign rather than a broader civic coalition. 

Strategic questions

Attempts to destabilize UK society currently exist in a ‘space between peace and war’, with attacks seeking to exploit vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions. 

Europe’s Centre of Excellence in Countering Hybrid Threats therefore recommends a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, using societal resilience as an organizing framework to cohere other disparate policy areas. In Nordic states, this has extended to social, cultural, and constitutional policy, while the German zeitenwende (turning point) shift since 2022 has linked investment in the military with infrastructure resilience and economic development. 

Like most modern British governments, Keir Starmer outsourced security strategy to advisers and officials. This means that government ministers who were not involved in producing the SDR may not fully understand the logic and concepts that underpin it. At moments of ‘major structural upheaval’ such as now, politicians cannot rely on outsourcing defence and security policy to experts. Instead, the UK needs a grand strategy, which should involve both experts and politicians and pull together multiple threads of government. 

Any new prime minister will therefore not be able to neatly delineate domestic and international affairs. They must set out a common understanding of the threats to promote efforts system-wide. 

Unifying delivery 

Increasing societal resilience to hybrid threats moves beyond Cold War-era practices of civil preparedness. In addition to potential physical impacts, it encompasses questions of trust in institutions, information integrity and social cohesion. 

A clear area of connection for Andy Burnham, who is most likely to be the UK’s next prime minister, is the focus on devolution to local and regional authorities. Ukraine’s experience suggests modern societal resilience depends on decentralization, with networked self-sufficient regions better able to build cohesion and resist destabilisation. 

UK local authorities benefit from notably higher levels of trust than central government, are already engaged in planning for emergencies, and are often on the frontlines in dealing with threats to social cohesion. However, a lack of resources and policy on building resilience to modern threats holds back further action in these areas. 

For a national conversation to succeed, co-operation with civil society must be more readily achievable, and public trust in authorities improved. Ukraine’s reforms have demonstrated locally accountable decision-making and delivery as a proven route for the UK to learn from.