UK will be at war by next election, says ex-Army Lib Dem MP – and will need conscription

“I’ve been sitting in private committee briefings with senior officials, and they say there’s a good chance we’ll be in a war before the next election. I think that’s right, that’s my view,” Mike Martin, the Liberal Democrat MP for Tunbridge Wells, elected to parliament in the 2024 election, tells me. “There’s certainly more than a 50% chance we’ll be involved in a war before 2030.”

Great. This is the prediction of a politician with more than a passing interest in military matters. Martin is a former British Army officer who served multiple tours of Afghanistan, picked up a PhD in war studies and has authored books including 2023’s How to Fight a War.

It’ll all be professional soldiers and drones though, you might think. A modern war for modern times. “Obviously if we got into a big war, we’d have conscription straight away,” says Martin. The Ukraine war has shown how, despite all the high-tech advances, modern wars still involve soldiers digging trenches like they did in the First World War. “Would we need to conscript? Yeah, we would. Because ultimately, we’re not at a stage yet where you can replace people with drones,” says Martin. “We’re a long way off from that. Drones are fine, as far as they go, but you still need people to occupy villages, hold ground, and all the rest of it. And that’s not going to change for quite some time.”

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The first non-Tory MP to hold the seat of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, Mike Martin has thrown himself into the heart of parliament’s wranglings over defence, sitting on the defence select committee and the joint committee on national security. Now he’s drinking a full-fat Coke at 5pm and explaining to Big Issue where the next war might come from, how the government will likely have to find an extra nearly £20bn for defence spending, and what the impacts of dodging hard calls on military matters could be.

With Labour’s administration hardly living up to the dreams of optimists, and the Lib Dems providing themselves a solid platform to build on, it’s not hard to imagine where a newcomer MP with a clear speciality could find themselves within an election or two.

Perhaps the defining domestic crisis of the past few years – soaring energy bills – has its roots in the Ukraine war. But as the government looks for areas to cut spending and save money, Martin believes defence spending is a neglected topic with an outsize influence at home.

“I think had we deterred adequately then, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to be deterring now in Ukraine. And you know what, if we don’t successfully deter in Ukraine, it will get more expensive still,” he says. At the heart of How to Fight a War is the idea that war is communication, done through violence. By extension, letting our military capabilities wither sends a strong message to Putin and beyond.

“Despite the fact that we are in a really precarious international situation, the government has no desire to talk about defense and security, because if they acknowledge the pretty parlous state of the British military, they open up another front of more people arguing for more spending, so they make their lives difficult.”

Bubbling underneath the ongoing domestic malaise in the UK is a crucial time for our position in the world. A Strategic Defence Review – one of Labour’s manifesto promises – is due in the first half of the year, with the government committing to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, up from the 2.3% spent now. Putting further pressure on, Donald Trump wants NATO members to spend 5% of GDP on defence – although reports suggest the always-negotiating president may likely settle for less.

“I think that the British government, any British government, by 2030 is probably going to be paying about 3%. It just seems to me, reading the world, reading the level of risk that there is at the moment, that seems to me where we’re heading, irrespective of the party politics of it,” says Martin.

This would represent about £17bn a year in extra spending – which equates to roughly 40% of what the state currently spends on disability benefits. Mike Martin asks: “I think the question that comes on the table is, well, what is it that you’re not paying for? Which budget is that money coming out of?”

If you got the current British Army together, they wouldn’t even fill Wembley Stadium. The size of the army is set to fall below 70,000 this year, the lowest since 1793. Martin says the Lib Dems want this to increase by 10,000 immediately, with a pathway of getting up to 100,000 – a size which would allow the army to deploy an armoured division to Europe.

You do not have to look far for somebody warning the world is more dangerous than ever. Beyond a rising China or a reckless Russia, Martin explains: “We’re at a very dangerous moment, because the structures and the consensus and the understanding we had of how the world fits together has all been upended.”

With the withering of the UN, the shifting of economic power, and new American policy, the rules have changed and consensu has evaporated. This makes it harder for leaders of countries to decide what to do in any given situation. “My fear is that in those environments, people make mistakes, they misjudge things, and they do stuff that actually they shouldn’t have done, and those mistakes then end up costing thousands of lives or start wars,” he says.

“Traditionally, when humans have moved from one period of order to another period of order, they’ve had a big war in the middle, but they’ve reset and redrawn that ‘OK now we’re organising ourselves like this’. The question is can we transition from one consensus to another without going through a massive war, or a bigger war than all the wars we’re seeing at the moment,” Martin says.

OK, heavy stuff. Civilisational stuff. Probably not the wavelength a bog-standard MP operates on, if we’re honest. I settle on a way to lighten the mood. Look back to the early Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond films, and in retrospect they’re a time capsule of the security worries of the age: the post-Soviet vacuum, mischief in the South China sea, terrorists getting hold of weapons they shouldn’t. Then it got a bit silly with Daniel Craig, although one fan theory holds that the reason No Time to Die didn’t really make sense is because it was initially about a virus being released on the world. So, to translate the worries of the age into something more tangible, what threats to the UK would Mike Martin have Bond tackling?

“That’s the problem. I could write a James Bond script about chasing down chemical weapons in Syria that have been released from the Assad stockpile when the government fell and some terrorists are trying to find and set them off in Europe. That’s a James Bond plot,” he says, getting into it.

“I can equally do a James Bond plot about a Russian thing in the Baltics where they’re trying to flip those governments. I can equally do a James Bond plot set in America, with everything going on in America – and it’s kind of a dark one, but you can see a British spy trying to save America from itself. You can see so many options for a James Bond plot actually. China is the obvious one, what’s going on in China in the Pacific is another one. There’s not one clear obvious threat, there’s multiple threats.”

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