Le trattative per l’adesione del Regno Unito al Fondo di difesa europeo di punta finiscono con un fallimento
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-28/talks-for-uk-to-join-flagship-eu-defense-fund-end-in-failure
di bloomberg
Le trattative per l’adesione del Regno Unito al Fondo di difesa europeo di punta finiscono con un fallimento
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-28/talks-for-uk-to-join-flagship-eu-defense-fund-end-in-failure
di bloomberg
16 commenti
*From Bloomberg News reporters Andrea Palasciano, Alex Wickham, and Alberto Nardelli*
Negotiations for the UK to join the European Union’s flagship €150 billion defense fund have failed, according to people familiar with the matter.
Despite talks between officials this week, the two sides remained far apart on the financial contribution Britain would make to participate in the Security Action for Europe program, or SAFE, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Starmer is pretty willing to agree to deals internationally because it gives him an excuse to fly abroad and avoid the national conversation where he is almost universally hated. You must have terribly messed up and overplayed your hands in the negotiations if even he prefers to stay at home.
We get our fish back now, right?
In all seriousness, this is for the best. It was a bad deal for what they were asking for, and we can hopefully reinvest those funds into domestic capability.
Edit: spelling
No thanks. I don’t want billions to be spent on a federal European army.
Labour is asking regular working people to pay more taxes and if they hand over billions of € to EU for a deal upfront, which might end up being a bad RoI, that would not be a popular decision with the electorate considering where Labour are in the polling currently…
I assume the 35% participation access remains (As with Japan and S.Korea)…
Best for all parties I suspect.
The negotiations around this highlight the problems with joint European defence, this decision has made us all weaker. We need to stop pretending like Russia isn’t rapidly rearming on our doorstep.
I’m not surprised. The reality of things is that this is just a business decision for HMG and that we ultimately do not sell enough equipment to the nations that are largely benefiting from SAFE loans for them to have much chance of seeing a return on their investment unless the contributions that the EU were asking for were extremely low. The main UK arms exports that are in the pipeline are either going to nations outside the EU or nations (like Denmark) who aren’t getting money out of SAFE anyway.
Does it actually matter? I’m not sure that it does all that much to be honest. As I say the mains arms deal targets are kinda elsewhere, we do a lot of licensing, and ultimately money is fungible. There’s equipment that nations will absolutely buy like Meteor (40% made in the UK, well over the SAFE limit) that they’ll just use other money to acquire, freed up by using SAFE funds elsewhere on equipment the UK doesn’t sell.
Good stuff. Seemed like a very bad deal.
Unfortunately this seemed to be the only acceptable outcome here. Until the EU (see France) start treating defence as a special case instead of a stick to beat the UK with then I don’t see an alternative.
Now the UK needs to refocus on its own defence and invest in defence capital expenditure.
Classic UK cakeism.
I dont know if this will be a good or bad thing im just genuinely shocked how long this has taken to resolve especially with whats going on in Ukraine right now you think their would be a bit of urgency to sort this shit.
Look part of this funds purpose is to support domestic production of arms in the EU.
Widening the UK’s access directly contradicted this.
We might believe and hope that the UK and EU will always share close views on security and defence but look at the change in policy from the US.
The odds are slim but not impossible that the UK and EU wont be aligned in the future.
EU and UK both desperately need to build domestic production.
Uk arms manufacturer can still secure some of the funding from SAFE. Just not as much
Don’t understand Europe’s angle on this, freezing out Europe’s most powerful military and 1 of 2 nuclear powers due to petty grievances. Their inflexibility doesn’t accomplish anything, it only makes us more vulnerable to Russian aggression
Having just come from the Saint George’s flag thread and how it revived bitterness from Brexit (and may be a harbringer for whatever is to come with Reform, some of them have been caught collaborating with Russia), it’s probably for the best for all.
There’s no trust, and it won’t stop aid to Ukraine (it was more for joint defence).
EU: we want 6.75 billion
UK: best i can do is 82 million
actual FB marketplace lowball offer. that’s 1.2% of what the EU was asking. that’s straight up insulting