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LONDON — Keir Starmer has published a long-awaited plan to spend billions of pounds on defense that could cement his legacy as a world statesman. In doing so, he has effectively tied his successor’s hands.

The British prime minister’s speech heralding the arrival of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) will probably be the last major piece of policy he announces before stepping down, with Andy Burnham all but certain to take over as leader in three weeks.

He announced an extra £15 billion for the armed forces to meet the greatest threats facing the U.K., including £5 billion towards autonomous systems such as drones and uncrewed vehicles. The defense budget now sits at almost £300 billion over the next four years.

This included an additional £1.5 billion of new money secured by new Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis on top of the initial proposal – which prompted Jarvis’ predecessor, John Healey, to resign.

But significant problems remain. The DIP gives no funding pathway to hit the U.K.’s NATO target of 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, and with no commitment to provide one before the next general election, scheduled for 2029.

The U.K. will hit 2.7 percent next year, and that number will not rise before 2030.

Should he become prime minister, Burnham will have to use his first budget to find almost £5 billion to fund Starmer’s plans, as well as use his first spending review to find billions more to make good on Britain’s promise to NATO allies.

Starmer took the opportunity to lay out what he sees as his key international achievements in office, talking up the coalitions he helped build to support Ukraine and bring stability in the wake of the Iran conflict. He also boasted of “delivering the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the 1980s.”

In doing so, the outgoing PM effectively shone a light on what he believes Burnham’s priorities should be on the world stage, even setting out his own prescription for how they should be met. But at the same time he called attention to some of the deep frustrations during his own time at No.10, which saw him push national security up the Labour Party’s agenda while failing to match the pace of Britain’s allies in rearming.

Andrew Kinniburgh, director-general of Make UK Defence, said: “As many other European allies rapidly accelerate towards meeting our new NATO target several years early, the U.K. is on the go-slow.”

Partial relief

The arrival of the DIP will allow defense companies and service personnel to breathe a sigh of relief. While arguments continue over the level of funding, many will be pleased that it provides some certainty and allows people to make commercial and strategic decisions after spending the last ten months in limbo.

Kevin Craven, CEO of ADS, which represents more than 2,000 firms in the sector, said: “The clarity provided will support the U.K.’s defense industry to do what we do best: supply equipment, capabilities and services that ensure the UK’s national security.”

Andy Burnham talks to the media in Ashton-in-Makerfield, England on June 9, 2026. | Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

Yet there was widespread acceptance even at the plan’s launch that the price tag is only part of the picture. Answering questions at the headquarters of a drone manufacturer in Berkshire, Starmer described the DIP as a “massive step forward” while effectively admitting he had no road map for hitting 3 percent of GDP on spending, specifying that it “must be the number one priority at the next spending review.”

Healey, who quit in protest partly at the refusal to set out a roadmap towards the U.K.’s spending pledges, said: “We need a target date for 3 percent and a clear credible funding plan to meet our NATO commitment for 3.5 percent on defence by 2035,” because “European security is at stake.”

One Labour MP with a close interest in defense, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that the strategy “takes us forward” — but added “there is a lot more that needs to happen” which they said would now fall to Burnham when he assumes power.

A defense industry representative went further, saying: “It’s ludicrous that the PM could say earlier this month that our intelligence assessment is that Russia will be ready to invade a NATO country by 2030, only for him to then fail to commit to 3 percent by then.”

Ed Arnold, associate fellow at RUSI, said the “modest uplift” under the DIP to take Britain to around 2.7 percent by 2029 “only defers a massive financial injection to defense.”

Over to you

Starmer also laid out what he thinks Burnham should prioritize in his first spending review as prime minister – a major exercise carried out by the Treasury every few years – but fired a warning shot over other forms of financing reportedly being considered.

The DIP explicitly states that defense “will be the number one priority” at the next spending review, even though it will almost certainly be presented by the next chancellor and not Rachel Reeves, who appeared alongside Starmer at Tuesday’s launch.

The PM said that the mooted option of so-called “war bonds,” which have been floated by Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England economist who is advising Burnham, would “push interest rates higher at a time when one pound in every ten already goes on paying debt interest.”

He made no mention of the Canadian-backed multilateral Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), which will fuel the impression that the U.K. will not join as a founding member at next week’s NATO summit, despite a push from Burnham’s team for London to sign up.

The Treasury has allocated just £400 million in investment for the “Multilateral Defence Mechanism” – a proposal by the U.K., Finland and the Netherlands to provide financing for defense projects – around half of the DSRB’s entry requirement.

Most pressing for Burnham, the small print contained in the DIP states that £4.7 billion must be found in savings at the next budget — likely from cuts to other departments — with £1.8 billion of that front-loaded to the current financial year.

Allies of Burnham said he had been briefed on the DIP and backed the plan, but would not be drawn on how he planned to meet the targets which have eluded Starmer.

One person close to him said that he “recognizes the rising demands on defence and has been clear on the need for defence investment which unambiguously backs British jobs and British industry.”

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In a TikTok video that has racked up 1.4 million likes , men are handed scissors and a sheet of paper and asked to cut out a Christmas tree while describing their favorite memory with their partner. The men start telling a story, but most trail off as they concentrate on the cutting. In another clip, a woman calmly juggles four different chores while her husband struggles to put on socks and hold a conversation simultaneously.

These videos are designed to make you laugh. But they also reflect and reinforce the idea that women are better multitaskers than men. Studies putting this stereotype to the test have yielded very mixed results. Yet the idea that there is a gender difference in the ability to multitask remains lodged in the public mind. Researchers think there are various reasons why the stereotype persists.

Multitasking under the microscope

Science is clear on one thing: multitasking is incredibly difficult. The human brain has evolved to single-task. “We can do things at the same time when they are highly automatized, but other than that, humans in general struggle,” said Marco Hirnstein , professor in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Bergen, Norway. (I was relieved to hear that as I struggled to listen, take notes, and think of my next question all at once during our Zoom call.)

But when it comes to whether women are better multitaskers than men, scientists don’t seem to agree. Early studies seemed to back the stereotype. In 2013 , researchers in the U.K. found that everyone slowed down when multitasking — but men slowed down significantly more. Two years later, a Russian team reported that men used more parts of their brains to multitask and still took longer, suggesting that multitasking requires more effort in men.

Then the picture got complicated. A 2017 study concluded that men and women multitask equally well, even if their brains may go about it differently. In 2018 , when volunteers were given a realistic multitasking challenge — preparing a room for a meeting while fielding distractions — there was no difference between men and women on every measure the researchers tracked: accuracy, time, distance walked, remembering to do the right thing at the right moment, and dealing with distractions. A 2019 study found that multitasking led to a similar loss of speed and accuracy for both men and women.

Then a 2021 study flipped the script entirely, finding that men handled multitasking better than women, which the researchers chalked up to faster mental processing speed in men.

“The findings are incredibly inconsistent,” said Hirnstein . “I would say it’s probably even more inconsistent than you normally get in psychological research.”

Making sense of the research

Tilo Strobach , a professor in general psychology at MSH Medical School Hamburg, Germany, suspects that the mixed findings are due to differences in study design. “My feeling is that this mix is because of the different types of multitasking situations that were used across the studies,” he said.

Multitasking means doing two or more things simultaneously or in rapid succession. So talking while driving counts, but so does cooking, as it involves a quick sequence of steps. Different studies use different multitasking setups, with some task combinations overlapping in time and others being more sequential, explained Strobach. This variation in setups, he argues, helps explain why the findings are so mixed.

Gender differences in specific tasks also play a role. Hirnstein’s own research has shown that women tend to be better at finding and remembering words than men . Men are better at imagining what a complex 3D cube would look like if you were to rotate it . If you choose tasks for a multitasking experiment that already favor men or women, “then you’re probably just going to find the same difference that you observe in the single task,” Hirnstein said.

A good example of this is a 2013 study that found men were better at multitasking than women. The researchers traced this difference in multitasking outcomes to men’s superior spatial ability. Interestingly, when women were in the menstrual phase of their cycle — a time when women’s spatial skills are at their highest — the multitasking gap disappeared.

A self-fulfilling prophecy or a kernel of truth?

Strobach is certain that “there’s no difference between men and women at all” when it comes to multitasking ability.

But the stereotype can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said. If men expect to do worse than women, that expectation can sap their motivation and effort, increase their anxiety, and drag down their performance — making the stereotype look true even when no real difference in multitasking ability exists.

Hirnstein takes a slightly different view. He agrees that stereotypes affect performance, but believes that performance informs stereotypes too. People watch how others perform and generalize from that. The resulting stereotype is exaggerated and overly generalized, he said, “but there is this kernel of truth.”

Currently, “we don’t have proof that there is a sex difference in multitasking because the data is not consistent enough,” Hirnstein said. But he suspects there is one: “If you measure it right, you probably will find something.”

A specific behavior might drive the stereotype

André and Diana Szameitat, a husband-and-wife research team at Brunel University of London, have offered a different explanation for why the stereotype persists. André Szameitat is deputy director of the university’s Centre for Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience; Diana Szameitat is an honorary lecturer in its psychology department.

In a study published earlier this year in Psychological Research , the Szameitats asked 41 men and 37 women to juggle five tasks at once in a setup that closely resembled real life. At one table, participants followed a recipe with pretend ingredients. When a kitchen timer rang, they broke off and dashed to a second table for two quick tasks — a phone-number search and a visual search — then returned to cooking. All the while, they watched a slideshow of words, jotting down any on a red background, a task that mimics the act of keeping an eye on a toddler. And every 20 seconds, a speaker played a recorded question they had to answer aloud, such as: “Would you rather lose all your money and valuables, or every photo you’ve ever taken, and why?”

Across the cooking, searching, and monitoring tasks, men and women performed equally well. However, a difference emerged in the talking task. Men failed to answer the questions more than twice as often as women.

When a group of neutral observers, unaware of what the researchers were testing, watched short films of the participants at work, they rated the female multitaskers as being more in control of the task, performing better, and being less stressed than the male multitaskers. Their judgment was highly influenced by the participants’ performance on the conversation task.

André Szameitat said the study showed two things. First, men and women differ in how well they multitask when one of the tasks is talking. Second, other people see this difference and use it to judge how well someone multitasks. “We suggest that this pattern can explain why the stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men may have developed,” he said. But he warned that the results only show a correlation for now, and more work is needed to prove that men’s reticence while multitasking is what drives the stereotype.

For now, it remains unclear whether men strategically drop the conversation to focus, or because they are unable to keep talking while doing something mentally demanding. “It could be a conscious decision,” Hirnstein said. “It could also be that they had so much going on at the same time that something had to give, and the first thing to go was this verbal task.”

If a male partner starts ignoring you mid-conversation while he’s busy with something else (just like the men in those TikTok videos), “one shouldn’t get angry,” Szameitat said. The study suggests this is a common pattern, not rudeness.

But there are settings where a man’s reduced talkativeness could be a serious issue. “There are highly critical situations where communication is essential, for example between pilot and co-pilot or control tower,” Szameitat said. Yet it is not yet known whether the findings would carry over into a high-stress event such as an aviation emergency, or whether the difference might disappear under that kind of pressure. This is a question for future research, Szameitat said. “Because these are early findings, it is important not to overstretch such implications and avoid headlines like ‘Men can’t fly planes’ or alike.”

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