UK Column News — 16th September 2026

Mike Robinson (0:08)

Good afternoon, it's Wednesday the 16th of September, 2026, just after one o'clock. Welcome to UK Column News. I'm your host, Mike Robinson. Joining me in the studio today is Charles Malet. Welcome to the program, Charles. Thank you, Mike. It has. And Vanessa Beeley joins us by video link from Lebanon. I later in the program, we'll be reporting on mass demonstrations in Syria. We'll have the latest digital ID news from here in the UK. And well, the question is, will Argentina call Britain's bluff and take back the Falklands Islands on behalf of Israel, perhaps, Charles? But we'll begin today with war spending because the BBC this morning had this story headlined, UKN talks about joining global defense bank led by Canada. And the article says Chancellor John Healey is considering a bid to join the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank not long after his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, rejected the idea. Canada has been leading efforts to establish the bank which supporters say would enable governments to borrow at lower costs to increase military spending. Well, that's at least partly nonsense. Britain, in fact, was the country that led efforts to establish the bank will come up to that in a second. The idea for the Global Defense Bank, otherwise known as the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank or DSRB, began with a 2019 briefing by former British Army officer Rob Murray, who's now NATO's head of innovation. And that was given to the office of the NATO secretary general. It was developed publicly through a 2020 Atlantic Council paper by Max Bergman and Sienna Ciccarelli, entitled Open a Bank. And then in April 2023, Financial Times opinion piece by Murray and Murray's full-length Atlantic Council in-depth report followed on. That was called How a New Global Defense Bank, the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank Can Solve US and Allied Funding Problems. And that was published on the 13th of December 2024

So, political momentum built rapidly in 2025 because NATO members at the Hague. In June 2025, the Hague Summit adopted a 5% of GDP Defense Investment Pledge. And then in July 2025, a UK government task force, which was co-chaired by Rachel Reeves and the then Defense Secretary John Healy, endorsed the creation of the DSRB.

And in August 2025, transatlantic financial leaders, including JP Morgan Chase, Commerce Bank, ING Group and Landis Bank, Baden-Württemberg announced their public backing. But then on the 8th of September last year, the DSRB Development Group convened a meeting in the city of London. And that was attended by representatives from 37 nations, including all the G7 nations, the European Commission, NATO, the European Parliament and also the Global Ratings Agencies. Now the European Parliament passed a resolution urging EU member states to participate.

And then on the 29th of April this year, after charter negotiations in Montreal, 19 founding member nations unanimously selected Canada as the bank's host country.

That was led by Prime Minister Mark Carney. But of course, in the meantime, the UK had decided that it was going to step back from it, and that resulted in this, which was the resignation of John Healey as Defense Secretary at the time. And as you remember, he said, as I've outlined to you, there are credible ways of meeting the midterm funding challenges. And he was clearly referring to the DSRB. And as I say, the leader of the pack as far as wanting to host the thing was Mark Carney. And that's where the BBC gets the Canada part of it. So the question, what happened then, of course, is that Healy resigned.

The City of London event was happened that the British government pulled out of, and that's why Healy resigned. And then what happened then was that Canada, once Burnham became Prime Minister, urged him to reconsider joining the Global Defence Bank. And that seems to be exactly what has happened. The Financial Times then was making the point just after Burnham became Prime Minister and then made John Healy, Chancellor of the Exchequer, they were making the point that that resulted in shares rising in military related shares rising. And of course, that was going to be the result of the, or at least the response by the markets.

So let's just remind ourselves what this is all about. Because the DSRB, if we bring this on screen, is set up this way. It provides direct lending to allied governments. It also provides hedging and leasing services between allies.

And it's also supposed to create supply chain guarantees. It's a multilateral lending institution. It's absolutely modelled on the World Bank.

It's going to be owned by the participating nation states. And it's designed to finance defense security and resilience investments across NATO members and allied democracies. Its central bank, its central business, sorry, as I say, is loans and so on. But the question then is, how does that actually work in practice? Well, they are going to have two forms of capital. They're going to have what's called paid-in capital, is where the countries that are involved actually put money into the thing. Well, the countries that are involved don't have any money to put into the thing. So that's where the second part of this comes in, which is the subscribed capital, if we just put that back on screen for a second. And this is where basically there are pledges made as a result. And the aim here is to be able to create AAA-rated sovereign bonds. And this is why it was important that at that City of London meeting, the ratings agencies were there and that they seemed to be on board with this. But here's the kicker for us as taxpayers. Any money loans to countries on the basis of this arrangement basically are off the balance sheet. And so what does that mean? That means that we can't know unless we're told, and it's unlikely that we're going to be told everything, we can't know how much money is actually being generated through these bonds and how much money individual countries are spending on this stuff. It's quite an incredible situation. Now there has been some noises from City of London type organizations saying, you're not going to fool us. Obviously bonds are going to be issued, so there's going to be an idea of the total amount of money that's being raised by this thing. But us as British taxpayers won't know how much our government is paying, and that is just an incredible situation, Charles.