I recently asked a senior Labour figure what Andy Burnham’s defence agenda might look like. “He doesn’t really have one,” came the reply – offered not so much as a criticism of the UK’s prime minister in waiting, as a statement of fact. Given that Keir Starmer’s resignation came after a mutiny within his own government over inadequate defence spending,some may view Burnham’s lack of direct defence experience as a worrying liability.
But beyond the UK, Starmer was at least viewed as a statesman for his commitment to the defence of Ukraine. Leaders in western Europe’s other capitals may now fear that Starmer’s untested successor will be more focused on “No 10 North” than on Nato and European security.
In fact, Burnham has the potential to be a transformative leader on defence precisely because he did not emerge from the foreign-policy seminar rooms of SW1. Burnham made his name as the mayor of Manchester fighting central government on behalf of the city, not building a Whitehall foreign-policy career. But that supposed gap can be his advantage. He should lean into his proven strength from his time running the UK’s second city: domestic resilience.
The broader problem for Britain, like most western nations, is that it still views defence as something that occurs elsewhere: a question of carrier groups, Nato summits and armies massing on someone else’s border. But the threat is not remote: the UK is already under attack. Maybe not frombullets or bombs, but from more than a decade of Russian psyops, bot farms, cyberhacks, sabotage, assassinations on British soil and the buying of political influence.
Even the prime minister himself has come under attack. For months, Starmer faced a campaign of online vitriol and disinformation; when he resigned, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev crowed “We did it” – certainly overstating Moscow’s influence, but a telling boast all the same.
In May last year, a car and two properties linked to Starmer were set alight by a Ukrainian and a Romanian national recruited and paid by a Russian-speaking handler. Even after a senior counter-terrorism police officer described the case as fitting the pattern of Russian state-backed sabotage, the UK gave a collective shrug.
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That shrug is the real security threat, and it helps Moscow more than any warehouse fire. Russia cannot sink the Royal Navy and it does not need to. How much more effective to corrode the solidarity, trust and sense of identity that holds a democratic society together – so that when the cut cables, cyberhacks and plausibly deniable drone attacks arrive, people turn on each other rather than the attacker.
This is what effective hybrid warfare achieves. It turns our institutions, our media, our industries and our very minds into the battlefield. Hybrid defence, too, must start at home. Regardless of what percentage of GDP is spent on defence, the resilience of Europe’s citizens and communities determines the resilience of our countries.
When Ukraine was invaded in 2022, the country was outmatched on every conventional measure: manpower, hardware, money. It survived because society mobilised, and this resilience strengthened the nation’s military defence: political leaders boosted troop morale; villagers blocked tanks in the streets and called in Russian troop movements. In the spring of 2022, I met civilians who were running ad-hoc intelligence networks alongside their day jobs, and coordinating fundraising and logistics to send under-equipped units everything from armoured vehicles to toothpaste. I met engineers tinkering with commercial drones in basements, garages and dacha kitchens. Just a few years on, their innovations now strike Russia daily. Community-level resilience enabled Ukraine to survive, and in the process built a thriving defence innovation industry that’s now turning the tide of the war.
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You don’t need to face a full-scale invasion to understand the value of civil resilience. Finland is the global benchmark because it treats national security as a whole-of-society responsibility. Its “comprehensive security” model integrates government, businesses and civil society to protect the vital functions of the state. Its 50,000 civil defence shelters can protect 85% of the population; I visited one in Helsinki and was impressed to find, rather than a grim concrete bunker, a community space open for use as a sports hall and playground. Finns understand that citizens’ ability to think critically and make informed choices is a security asset and therefore they protect it. Media literacy and the skills needed to identify fake news are taught in school from age three.
Burnham’s domestic record shows he understands the importance of resilience too. As mayor he faced a number of serious security threats, from the Manchester Arena terror attack to floods, fires and the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than just react, he rebuilt how Manchester prepares. After the arena attack he commissioned an independent review, then acted on its findings. He appointed Greater Manchester’s first chief resilience officer and boosted an existing resilience forum that now coordinates more than 80 agencies to assess risk and respond to crises.
Someone attacked Burnham’s city; he ordered an honest reckoning and institutionalised the lessons. That is precisely the move a prime minister dealing with the threat of hybrid war would need to make – at national scale.
Burnham has already sketched the blueprint by promising to decentralise decision-making from London to the UKs nations and regions. He frames this as socioeconomic renewal. It is also, though he did not say so, a model for rewiring Britain’s defence. A country whose prosperity and power are spread across every region is fairer and harder to turn against itself, harder to break. A nation’s resilience is built from within communities, not commanded top-down from a ministry.
The defence spending argument that convulsed Labour and cost Starmer his defence secretary also missed this point. Burnham faces the challenge of correcting Starmer’s defence underspend, but he has an opportunity to bring forward a package that is unmistakably his own. This would be a national defence and resilience strategy that sufficiently funds traditional military strength and deterrence, pairedwith serious investment in the home front: ineducation, critical and digital infrastructure, and the jobs their maintenance requires. The point is not to choose between tanks or teachers, missiles or minds – all are vital to national defence in an era of hybrid warfare.
Britain isn’t alone in this. Europe and Nato need to embed resilience in defence because Ukraine and Finland remain exceptions, not the rule. My own country, Germany, is uniquely unprepared for societal resilience.Although we are Nato’s logistical backbone in Europe, decades of underinvestment have left us with crumbling roads, railways and bridges. This is a defence vulnerability even without Russian sabotage and cyber-attacks.
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At the Nato summit in Ankara this week, European leaders will bid Starmer farewell, and maybe share murmured doubts about his successor’s foreign policy chops. Paris, Berlin and Brussels have understandable fears, but Burnham can lay them to rest: a country that strengthens its communities and hardens itself against hybrid war is a stronger ally, not a weaker one. A former mayor who learned resilience on the ground can better lead the charge than defence grand strategists realise.
Russia has turned the home front into the frontline. It’s time for defence to come home too.
