British defence jobs and skills will keep us safe, says the PM. So he’d better buy the UK’s jet, not the US one

3 hours ago 1

In his statement to parliament last week, Keir Starmer pledged £13.4bn more spending on defence from 2027, rising to 3% of GDP in the next parliament. This additional spending is critical for our future defence. The House of Lords defence committee has pointed out that decades of underinvestment have hollowed out our defences, and that our vulnerabilities, especially in air defences, could put the UK in peril.

The prime minister also promised that the government “will translate defence spending into British growth, British jobs, British skills and British innovation”. Our 70,000 Unite members working in UK defence companies will certainly hold him to it.

The first test of this “brave new world” will be how we replace our ageing RAF fighter jets. The RAF has 24 T1 Eurofighter Typhoons that need to be replaced. The obvious thing to do is purchase two new squadrons of the upgraded T5 Typhoons. All the UK’s other partner nations in the Eurofighter Typhoon consortium – Germany, Italy and Spain – have recently made similar decisions.

But it seems the UK is going in another direction, perhaps purchasing American-made F-35 jets. The Royal Navy already uses F-35s on its aircraft carriers. Unite is not proposing to change that. But replacing British RAF Typhoons with American F-35s would make a mockery of the prime minister’s promise on British jobs and British skills.

A Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 (above) and an F-35B Lightning II aircraft

Unite research has determined that a UK order of 24 F-35s would only secure two or three months of work in the UK, for about 2,000 workers. An order for 24 Typhoons would secure more than 20,000 jobs for years for workers in BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Leonardo and the UK supply chain.

The skills issue is, if anything, even more concerning. Right now, the UK can develop, deploy and control our own fighter jets. And we are part of a vital programme to continue that capacity into the future. The global combat air programme (GCAP) will allow the UK to produce the next generation of fast fighters, beyond Typhoons, known in the UK as Tempest, along with our partners Italy and Japan.

As the House of Commons defence committee recently warned: “Retention of the existing Typhoon manufacturing workforce … until full-scale production of Tempest is under way, must be a priority.” Tempest is planned to enter service in 2035. If we don’t get more Typhoons to assemble in the UK in the interim, it will be too late.

The UK is one of the few countries in the world with the capacity, at BAE Systems in Warton, Lancashire, to do final assembly on the most modern fighter jets. At Rolls-Royce we also have the highly specialist capacity to manufacture and maintain what the Americans call afterburners for military jet engines. To retain these critical skills, and the vital military capability that follows from that, we desperately need a new order of Typhoons. If that doesn’t happen, these skills, these jobs and our national sovereignty over our air defences will be lost.

The F-35 is not a better aircraft. The Typhoon has better range, better air defences and can carry both British and US-made weapons. RAF Typhoon fighter jets are much better suited to policing Nato’s borders to fight any future Russian threat than F-35s, which were designed as stealth fighters for much shorter missions.

We have to also avoid becoming dangerously reliant on American technology. This is all the more important because of President Trump’s recent insistence that he favours some conciliation with Russia to end the Ukraine war, and that the UK and Europe are now on their own when it comes to defending their borders. The way the US president is behaving, he might just have a bad morning one day and decide to deny us access to the data that we would need to go into combat with F-35s. We could be locked out of our own defence system.

So, vital decisions for defence beckon. The Labour government’s strategic defence review is due soon. It must include the renewal of the RAF fighter fleet by buying new Typhoons. The alternative would not only endanger thousands of jobs, it would compromise our national security and, after the PM’s announcement, would see this government snatching defeat from the jaws of victory – with a bad choice and another failed promise.