Andy Burnham in Kyiv: A War Economy Built on Missiles Will Only Last as Long as the War
Andy Burnham’s first foreign trip as Prime Minister took him to Kyiv, where he announced the declassification of SCALP missile technology and chaired the Coalition of the Willing. As billions flow into missiles, submarines and a defence-led industrial strategy, Britain’s working-class communities are still waiting for the same urgency, investment and ambition at home.
Andy Burnham’s first trip abroad as Prime Minister was not to Brussels, or Washington, or anywhere that might have signalled a shift in Britain’s economic direction. It was to Kyiv. Six weeks into a premiership he opened by promising to be a “circuit breaker” for towns like Barrow and Blackpool, the places he has spent a career promising to rebuild and has yet to find time to properly visit as Prime Minister, Burnham used his first flight out of the country to mark Ukraine’s independence day, standing outside St Sophia Cathedral to tell the crowd that Britain had kept the flame of European freedom alive in the last century and that Ukraine now carried it in this one.
The occasion itself was real enough. Burnham was chairing his first meeting of the so called Coalition of the Willing, the grouping set up by Britain and France to coordinate support for Ukraine, and he used it to press allies to dig deeper into their own missile stocks. Patriot interceptors have grown scarce since supplies were diverted to the Middle East during the war with Iran, and Kyiv is bracing for another winter of Russian strikes on its power grid. Alongside the missile appeal, Burnham announced that Britain would let the defence firm MBDA declassify UK components of the SCALP missile, the French sibling of Britain’s Storm Shadow, clearing the way for France and Ukraine to build an assembly line for the weapon on Ukrainian soil, extending its reach deeper into Russian territory. Zelensky, for his part, told the coalition Ukraine faces a defence funding gap of €27 billion for next year alone, and pointed his allies toward the frozen Russian assets sitting in European vaults as one place to find it.
“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.” ― George Orwell
The security case Burnham is making is the same one Starmer made before him: an aggressor state, a fight for democratic survival, a debt Britain owes for keeping its own flame alive once. It is a clean story, and it leaves out where this war actually started. It did not begin as an unprovoked assault on a peaceful neighbour in February 2022. It began in 2014, when a government in Kyiv was toppled with active Western encouragement, when Russian speakers in the Donbas had their language rights stripped and answered with a bid for autonomy, and when eight years of shelling, logged daily by OSCE monitors on the ground, killed far more people in Russian-speaking Donbas than anywhere else in that theatre, as this paper set out at length via the former Swiss intelligence colonel Jacques Baud.
The Minsk agreements meant to settle it, negotiated and guaranteed by France and Germany, were never honoured by Kyiv and were quietly abandoned by the West that had promised to enforce them. Russia crossing the border in February 2022 was not the opening act of this war. It was the moment an eight year civil conflict, manufactured and sustained by EU and US sponsorship of one side, turned into a war between states. None of that makes the missiles falling on Kyiv this winter any less real. It does mean the moral architecture Burnham is building, in which Britain has no choice but to arm one side indefinitely, rests on an origin story that starts eight years too late.
There is also the question of who is still actually running this war. Washington set its strategic terms, supplied the intelligence, and provided the political cover for the coalition Burnham now chairs. Then its attention moved on, first to the Middle East, where its Patriot stocks now go instead of Kyiv, and then away from the war altogether under an administration with no appetite to sustain it. What Burnham has inherited is not a fresh cause but an old one whose principal sponsor has largely left the building, and every coalition meeting produces the same request from Kyiv: more interceptors, more declassified technology, more money to close a funding gap that keeps reopening. A war both sides insist is winnable if the West simply does more has, by that same logic, no natural end. That is not solidarity. It is a subscription with no cancellation clause, and Britain has just signed up for another year.
This is the inheritance Burnham has stepped into, and the language of solidarity has folded itself around a second, quieter argument: that arming Ukraine is also how Britain rebuilds itself. This is the part of the pitch that should stop Labour voters in the old heartlands in their tracks. Burnham has made reindustrialisation the organising idea of his premiership, and again and again, when pressed on where the jobs will actually come from, his answer runs through a barracks or a shipyard rather than a factory making anything a household could use. At Portsmouth Naval Base, hosting Zelensky, he called defence a “top priority” precisely because of the jobs it promises. At Farnborough he told the air show that Britain would reindustrialise the nation through exactly this kind of investment. At Barrow in Furness, where BAE Systems already employs thirteen and a half thousand people building Trident’s replacement submarines, his government has pointed to an £8.4 billion contract phase promising eighteen thousand more jobs by 2030. The Ministry of Defence’s own figures show spending with industry running at £31.9 billion a year, supporting 274,000 jobs, with munitions employment alone reported up by more than half in twelve months. Reindustrialisation, in Burnham’s Britain, increasingly means one thing: the sovereign capacity to make things that kill people, at scale, for as long as the war lasts.
Set that against what the same government has found for the crisis at home. Burnham’s flagship anti poverty pledge, announced in his first days in office, was £340 million over three years to end long term rough sleeping. It is a smaller sum than a single tranche of submarine contracts, spread over three times as long, to address a problem that sits alongside a food bank system distributing 2.6 million emergency parcels a year, forty five per cent more than before the pandemic, with parcels going to pensioners at nearly two and a half times the rate of five years ago. The VAT cut on household energy bills he has scheduled for October is being funded, his government says, by scrapping Starmer’s digital ID scheme rather than by any new revenue. Britain, in other words, can find billions for missile stocks and submarine yards inside weeks of a Prime Minister taking office, and has to raid one small savings line to find relief for people choosing between heating and eating.
The Communist Party’s general secretary Alex Gordon put the political charge of this plainly after Kyiv, accusing Burnham of continuing down the same road as Boris Johnson and Starmer before him and calling Britain Nato’s “messenger boy”. Whatever one makes of the source, the underlying observation does not require any particular party card to see. A government that campaigned on breaking a broken system has, within weeks, committed itself further into a military industrial relationship with the EU and Washington’s coalition partners than any of its predecessors, and has done so with barely a ripple of parliamentary scrutiny. Starmer’s £90 billion EU loan commitment for Ukraine, agreed in Yerevan days before local elections with no Commons vote and no published estimate of Britain’s exposure, set the precedent. Burnham has not reversed it. He has extended it, with a fresh SCALP declassification and a fresh round of missile appeals, agreed in Kyiv rather than Westminster, and announced to reporters rather than debated by MPs.
Even setting the war itself aside, the economics of Burnham’s reindustrialisation bet are not obviously sound on their own terms. Sympathetic commentators who share none of the left’s discomfort with Nato have made the same point from the other direction, noting that state subsidised factory jobs have a poor record of paying for themselves and pointing to the roughly half a million pounds per job the National Audit Office estimated it will cost to keep the nationalised Scunthorpe steelworks running to 2028. If reindustrialisation through defence contracts struggles to justify itself even inside a friendly audience, it should not be waved through unexamined simply because the word “Ukraine” is attached to it.
Which leaves the question nobody in Kyiv or Westminster wants to answer out loud. Burnham has built the beginnings of an industrial strategy on submarine yards, missile factories and drone assembly lines whose order books depend, in large part, on a war continuing somewhere. What happens to Barrow’s eighteen thousand promised jobs, to the rise in munitions employment, to the entire architecture of “security led growth” his government has started to build, if the fighting in Ukraine actually stops, or if Washington’s disengagement finally forces a settlement Britain has had no say in shaping? Nobody has said. A reindustrialisation strategy that quietly needs the war to keep running is not renewal. It is dependency dressed in the flag.
There is a version of British reindustrialisation that does not require a war to sustain it: public investment in the housing stock that leaves children breathing in damp, in the transport links that strand people from work, in the energy system that leaves pensioners rationing warmth in their own homes. That version does not need Kyiv, or Brussels, or a Coalition of the Willing to sanction it. It only needs a government willing to spend at home with the same speed and the same confidence it has just shown abroad. Burnham found billions within weeks for missile stocks. His own working class voters are still waiting to see what he can find, with the same urgency, for them.
Britain once fought the ideology whose Ukrainian standard-bearer, Andriy Biletsky, founded the very movement Kyiv now honours: a man who spoke openly of leading a crusade against races he called inferior. Zelensky has pinned medals on Right Sector veterans inside Ukraine’s own parliament, and Kyiv still keeps its monuments to Stepan Bandera, whose forces killed Poles and Jews alongside the Wehrmacht. Washington may have decided in 2024 that today’s Azov Brigade passes muster. It should not have taken a vetting process to ask the question in the first place. Britain should not have to burn its own house down to keep funding a war whose own allies it still has not looked at plainly.
