Politics: the lies direct

By Richard North - March 27, 2026

The question of how badly the British public have been misled over the status of the UK’s intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) defences continues to haunt me.

Despite deep immersion in the subject, on a very rapid learning curve which now brings me to my fifth article, I feel I am only just beginning to unravel the unholy mess that constitutes our national ballistic missile defence (BMD) effort, peeling away the onion layers that represent multiple failures.

These decisions which have led to these failures embrace high policy and defence procurement, and have evaded effective scrutiny by MPs (Lords and Commons), the media and a whole range of defence “experts”, none of whom yet have explained why, after billions of pound of expenditure – and more to come with no effect – the UK lacks organic BMD (sufficient to deal with IRBMs from rogue states such as Iran), and is reliant entirely on an incomplete and barely effective Nato system, focused more on a putative Russian threat than Iran.

Part of the problem as I now see it is the insistence on grouping initiatives and expenditure under the portmanteau heading of Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD), which covers a multitude of functions, ranging from homeland air defence against fixed wing aircraft, to drones of all varieties, cruise missiles of various descriptions and performance and then, right on the edge of the performance envelope, ballistic missiles and a range of hypersonic weapons.

Since some of the defence systems have overlapping capabilities, and offensive weapons span a huge performance and role spectrum, ambiguity pervades the subject. For instance, one can deploy a multi-role defence system, optimised for intercepting aircraft and non-ballistic missiles.

But when that system also has a marginal capability to intercept short-range ballistic missiles, it is valid to describe it as an anti-missile missile and even include it in the BMD inventory. But such a generic description can obscure crucial performance limitations which can conceal a lack of capability to deal with very specific threats, such as IRBMs, which present their very own technical problems.

That is effectively the story of the Sea Viper (aka Aster) missile equipping the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers, which have been oversold as providing an anti-IRBM capability when then that role falls completely outside the system’s performance envelope.

Even though, in the Sunday Times article of fifteen months ago (that I mentioned yesterday), it is clear that the Type 45s are not capable of defending against the type of longer-range missile attacks represented by Iran’s IRBMs – flying too high and too fast for the systems to cope – confusion still blights the media narrative.

We saw this in the Independent only a few days ago when “defence expert” Francis Tusa wrote of a Type 45 needing to sit in the Thames estuary to defend London, whence it would only be “protecting the South East of England”, leaving many other sites across the country to be protected.

Even with a total of six Type 45s, writes Tusa, “there aren’t enough to provide anything like a coherent air defence of the UK – and it is a waste of a ship, which might be needed elsewhere”. For serious protection of the UK against ballistic and cruise missiles, he adds, “there is a need for ground-based air defence, mainly surface-to-air missiles, but also anti-air[craft] guns”.

One can see here that he adds to his own confusion by eliding ballistic missiles with cruise missiles, which represent a different kind of threat and require very different counter-measures.

Tusa also fails to distinguish between the short-range ballistic missile, which remains in the atmosphere, and the intermediate range version with its sub-orbital profile taking it into space with altitudes of 1000 Km, plunging back to earth at hypersonic speeds at between Mach 12 and 16 (Khorramshahr).

Addressing the specific question of whether Iran currently has the capability to strike London, Sky presenter Sophy Ridge yesterday challenged defence secretary John Healey to put people’s minds at rest.

Healey, as did Starmer before him, resorted to deflection, saying: “We have no assessment of Iranian plans to strike London. We have a defence of Britain that isn’t just about what we have for ourselves in and around Britain. Our defence of Britain is part of the layers of defence of Nato nations…”.

Ridge responded with the comment: “I don’t understand what that means, that you don’t have an assessment. Does that mean you don’t have an assessment at all so we don’t know? Or does that mean that your assessments don’t suggest that?”.

Healey still wasn’t prepared to open up. “I understand the concerns that British people will have”, he said, “but we have the resources and we have the alliances in place to be able to protect Britain. And we do that not just because we’ve got first class forces, but we have an alliance with 31 other Nato nations, and it’s together that we defend Nato and British airspace, Nato and British homeland”.

That reference to “31 other Nato nations” can only mean ESSI (European Sky Shield Initiative) as there is no other joint programme (and that is not even a Nato programme) – apart from EPAA which only directly involves five host countries. Had Ridge known this, she might also have known that it is not an active defence network.

Furthermore, at the time of signing the MoD stated there were no immediate plans to procure systems via the ESSI. Healey should have known this. He asked the question which produced the information.

Rather, the initiative was to be used to identify opportunities for cooperation to support existing UK programmes such as the Sky Sabre system – which is a short-range anti-aircraft missile system, with no anti-missile capability.

Letting that pass, Ridge continued with her theme directly asking: “Do we know if Iran has the capability to strike London?”, for which her reward was a wodge of extruded verbal material, where he told Ridge:

Look, what I’m saying, and trying to reassure people, is that we’ve got no assessment that Iran has any plans to attack, but we have the resources, we have the alliance in place to be able to defend Britain and we do that with allies, and we do that with Nato. And as far as Iran goes, they’re demonstrating a capacity to hit across the Middle East. We see the same tactics and technologies that we see employed by Russia in Ukraine and this is the hidden hand of Putin in both conflicts. And I’m releasing today our latest defence intelligence assessment, which says that Russia was almost certainly providing training, sharing intelligence with Iran ahead of this conflict, including on types of drones, including on electronic warfare.

One notes the deflection at the end, where he takes the subject away from ballistic missiles to drones, although in passing there is the lie direct, where Healey says: “we have the resources, we have the alliance in place to be able to defend Britain and we do that with allies, and we do that with Nato”.

Now we have both Starmer and Healey avoiding the issue as to whether Iran has the capability to strike Britain. Both are lying when they claim that Britain is able to defend itself.

Not only does Britain not have the capability, The Sunday Times notes that Healey, while in opposition, recognised the vulnerabilities on British soil and was particularly concerned that the UK had no capacity to shoot down ballistic missiles aimed at critical infrastructure or population centres. Healey is lying and he knows he’s lying.

As to the EPAA Aegis shield, this is far from complete and it is one over which the UK has no operational control – even if it supplies sensor data from RAF Fylingdales. It would be vastly improved if we had an Aegis Ashore system in the UK, but there is no indication that the UK will take this course of action.

Thus, the only faint hope is that, in the late 2030s, we take delivery of Type 83 destroyers which will be fitted with Mk 41 launcher, which can carry the more capable SM-3 Block IIA missiles. But another development shows that the UK is still committed to the inferior Aster missile.

On 30 January of this year, the MoD awarded a contract worth £2 million to MBDA UK to assess whether the Aster 30 missile could be adapted to use the Mk 41 launcher. Even with the £405 million enhancements, the missile (in its iteration as the Sea Viper Block 1NT) will still be inferior to the SM-3, while the UK software and radar systems will probably not be able to exploit the full functionality of the system.

This highlights another major facet of this debacle, where the politicians (alongside the military) do not seem to be able to choose between US and European hardware and systems, ending up with the worst of all possible worlds – a crude amalgam of both – affording us reduced capabilities at greater cost.

Basically, there is no answer to this unless the full glare of the media and opposition politics is focused on this insane position – which should be a gift for “insurgent” politicians such as Farage. Sadly, though, this seems to be beyond him, allowing himself to be easily distracted.

This, though, is the story of our times, where the lies flow and the scrutiny fails.