LONDON — Keir Starmer is expected to ignore calls — including from his likely successor as prime minister — for the U.K. to sign up to a multilateral defense bank championed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at next month’s NATO summit.
Two allies of Andy Burnham, who will take over as the new British prime minister mid-July barring an upset, said he and his advisers supported the idea of the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) and saw the Ankara meeting as the best chance to get it signed.
The U.K. government has been locked in a desperate hunt for cash to boost the armed forces, while Starmer is still pushing to finish the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan before he leaves office.
Burnham will face similar spending difficulties if he enters Downing Street, and has already acknowledged the need to cut other departmental funding to plug gaps. He and his team see DSRB as a worthwhile way to help inject more money into rearmament, according to the same two allies.
However, Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have long been cool on the idea and have so far resisted overtures from Ottawa to join when the bank is founded at the NATO gathering.
Gordon Brown, the former prime minister who Starmer has brought back as his global finance envoy, has been in discussions with Carney, but the Treasury now appears to be focused on merging the DSRB with the U.K.’s Multilateral Defence Mechanism with Finland and the Netherlands.
Reeves told the Commons this week: “We are … working closely with Canada on how we can bring the MDM and DSRB together so we can have one model that helps us better fund defense in our country and across Europe.”
Supporters of the bank say such a merger would delay it beyond the Ankara summit.
One MP familiar with the discussions said, “these things are working on completely different timescales,” and that DSRB is “ready to go,” whereas “there is no detail on MDM at all, so it’s impossible to talk about merging without stalling DSRB.”
An official from one of the U.K.’s partner countries in MDM said it was “very much still in the early stages.”
Meanwhile, a defense industry representative said that No.10 was “wholly focused” on delivering the DIP and inclined to leave new defense financing initiatives to Burnham.
A spokesperson for the Treasury said the department would not comment on hypotheticals, while Downing Street declined to comment.