CHANGE: ‘Everything has changed’: UK embarks on biggest arms drive since cold war.

Sir Keir Starmer told MPs on Tuesday that Britain was confronting a “world where everything has changed”, as he shredded the country’s overseas aid budget to fund a rearmament programme not seen since the cold war.

There was a sense in a sombre House of Commons that what Starmer called the “great postwar order” was being redrawn, as Britain and the rest of Europe adjust to the detonative impact of Donald Trump.

The pace is accelerating. On Wednesday UK chancellor Rachel Reeves will meet EU finance ministers at a G20 meeting in Cape Town to discuss a new funding mechanism to rebuild the continent’s enfeebled defences.

On Thursday Starmer meets President Trump at the White House to plead with him to maintain the US security guarantee in Europe, while the UK premier looks to host a new round of defence talks with European leaders in London on Sunday.

Amid the flurry of activity, Britain’s foreign policy posture has shifted overnight. A country that once prided itself as an “aid superpower” that spent 0.7 per cent of its national income on foreign assistance is now going to be far less generous.

“It’s not an announcement I’m happy to make,” said Starmer, as he revealed that the aid budget, already cut to 0.5 per cent by former Conservative chancellor Rishi Sunak during the pandemic, would shrink to just 0.3 per cent in 2027.

Like the UK’s increase in defence outlay itself, the decision to raid the aid budget is likely to win the approval of Trump, whose administration has begun dismantling America’s own development programme, USAID.

They keep blaming Trump for Britain finally perhaps getting back to looking after its defense like that’s a bad thing.