Print the Money and Build the Ships: How Britain Might Become a Great Naval Power Once Again

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 14 October 2026

There is something faintly ridiculous about the proposition that Britain, a country that once ruled the oceans of the world, should now find herself agonising over whether she can afford to build a few more warships. For centuries the Royal Navy was the principal instrument of British foreign policy, the foundation of British commercial prosperity, and ultimately the guarantee of the survival of the British state. The British Empire was not principally established by armies marching across continents. She was established by ships sailing across oceans, protected by a navy whose power was sufficiently formidable that few rival states seriously contemplated challenging her. Today Britain finds herself confronting an increasingly aggressive Russia, whose naval forces, particularly her submarines, present a growing threat to British national security, while successive British governments explain that the public finances are too constrained to contemplate a substantial restoration of British maritime supremacy.

The obvious question arises: why not simply print the money? Britain possesses her own currency, her own central bank, a sophisticated financial system, substantial remaining shipbuilding expertise, and a population containing significant numbers of people who feel excluded from the productive economy. She also has a large immigrant population, including many skilled and industrious people who might welcome the opportunity to contribute to a great national industrial project. Why not bring these people together, rebuild the shipyards of Britain, construct a formidable new fleet, and remind the Russians that Britain remains an island nation whose historical proficiency in naval warfare should not be underestimated? The proposal sounds almost embarrassingly straightforward. Its attraction lies in the possibility that, properly understood, it might be considerably more sensible than the orthodox economists of the British Treasury would initially care to admit.

To understand why, we must begin with a fundamental misconception about government finance. The British government is not analogous to a household, notwithstanding the persistent attempts of politicians to persuade the electorate otherwise. A household must earn money before it can spend it, or alternatively borrow money from somebody who already possesses it. A sovereign government issuing her own floating currency operates under substantially different constraints. The British state, acting through her monetary institutions, can create sterling-denominated financial assets, and the Bank of England has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to create central bank money electronically on an enormous scale. The Bank’s quantitative easing programmes following the financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic involved purchasing government securities and other assets with newly created central bank reserves. This was not the printing of physical banknotes, but its practical monetary significance was considerably greater than any number of printing presses turning out pieces of paper bearing the monarch’s portrait.

There is nevertheless an important distinction between quantitative easing and the direct financing of government expenditure. Under the present British constitutional and monetary arrangements, the Bank of England conducts monetary policy independently, while the Treasury finances public expenditure primarily through taxation and government borrowing. Quantitative easing ordinarily involves the central bank purchasing existing securities from investors, rather than handing the Chancellor a large electronic cheque with instructions to spend it on destroyers. During the coronavirus emergency, the Treasury and the Bank agreed to expand temporarily the availability of the government’s existing overdraft facility, demonstrating that institutional arrangements can be adapted in exceptional circumstances. That facility was expressly intended as short-term financial support, however, rather than a permanent method of financing public expenditure.

None of this establishes that a government cannot alter its monetary institutions, or that the existing arrangements represent some immutable law of economics. Parliament could authorise a different framework for financing a sufficiently important national investment programme. The deeper question is whether creating money to pay for the construction of warships would create genuine wealth or merely increase prices. Here the answer depends not upon the amount of money created in isolation, but upon the productive resources available to the British economy. Money cannot manufacture steel, train engineers, construct nuclear reactors or design sophisticated naval radar systems. It can, however, mobilise people and resources that might otherwise remain unused, and it can encourage the development of additional productive capacity that would never emerge in the absence of assured demand.

This distinction is central to the economic argument. If Britain were operating at full industrial capacity, with every skilled worker employed and every shipyard working around the clock, creating additional money to purchase warships would principally intensify competition for scarce resources. Wages and prices would rise, imports would become more expensive if confidence in sterling weakened, and the hoped-for expansion of naval power might prove considerably less impressive than the accompanying increase in inflation. However, if the British economy contains unused industrial premises, unemployed or underemployed workers, neglected communities, and productive capabilities that could be restored through investment, then additional expenditure can bring those resources into operation. The result may be an increase in real national output rather than merely an increase in the monetary price of existing goods and services. The difficulty is that spare labour in the economy does not necessarily mean spare naval-engineering capacity. The latter must be built deliberately, patiently and intelligently.

There is a powerful historical precedent for precisely this kind of national mobilisation. During the Second World War, Britain devoted an extraordinary proportion of her economic resources to military production, substantially reorganising her industrial economy in the process. Factories were converted to wartime purposes, women entered industrial employment in enormous numbers, and the state directed investment and production towards the overriding objective of national survival. British wartime expenditure was financed through a combination of taxation, borrowing, external assistance and monetary expansion. Nobody seriously suggested that the government should abandon the construction of warships because the Treasury had temporarily exhausted its annual allocation for maritime procurement. The essential question was whether Britain possessed, or could obtain, the productive capacity necessary to build the weapons upon which her survival depended.

The circumstances of the twenty-first century are admittedly different. Britain is not fighting an existential war against Germany, and the contemporary Russian Federation, whatever her ambitions, does not possess the capacity of the industrial and military powers against which Britain struggled during the twentieth century. Moreover, the maritime threat is technologically more complicated than in the age of battleships and cruisers. Russia’s submarine fleet, her ability to threaten undersea telecommunications cables and energy infrastructure, and her development of increasingly sophisticated naval weapons require responses that cannot be measured simply by counting the number of enormous grey vessels assembled in British shipyards. Nevertheless, the fundamental proposition remains sound. A country facing a sustained external security threat should consider whether her economic organisation is sufficiently purposeful to mobilise the resources necessary to protect herself.

Britain’s own defence establishment recognises much of this problem. The 2025 Strategic Defence Review proposed a new hybrid Royal Navy, combining conventional warships, nuclear submarines, autonomous surface vessels, underwater drones and sophisticated surveillance technologies. Its Atlantic Bastion concept envisages an integrated system of anti-submarine warfare capabilities designed to protect the North Atlantic from Russian underwater threats. The government has also committed itself to the continued construction of Type 26 anti-submarine frigates, Type 31 general-purpose frigates, and the Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarine programmes. The ambition is real, although the difficulties of financing, constructing, maintaining and crewing such a fleet remain formidable.

The most revealing fact is that Britain retains considerable shipbuilding expertise but struggles to convert her ambitions into a sufficiently large, sustainable and operationally effective fleet. The National Audit Office concluded in its assessment of the Ministry of Defence’s 2023–2033 equipment programme that projected costs exceeded the available budget by £16.9 billion. Although subsequent defence policy has changed, the report illustrated a longstanding structural difficulty: British defence procurement has repeatedly attempted to reconcile ambitious military commitments with financial allocations and industrial arrangements insufficient to deliver them reliably. The consequence is not merely a shortage of ships. It is a culture of delay, uncertainty, redesign, industrial inefficiency and the progressive erosion of confidence among the businesses and skilled workers upon whom military production ultimately depends.

Imagine instead that Britain established a National Maritime Reconstruction Programme, guaranteed for a period of fifteen or twenty years, with a clearly defined objective of substantially expanding her maritime industrial capacity. Its purpose would not simply be to procure a predetermined number of warships, but to rebuild the national infrastructure necessary to design, manufacture, maintain and modernise them. The shipyards of the Clyde, Rosyth, Barrow-in-Furness and other established maritime centres could form the foundations of such a programme, supported by new industrial facilities wherever labour availability, infrastructure and economic considerations justified them. Suppliers of steel, electronics, propulsion systems, precision engineering equipment and advanced materials would receive the confidence of long-term contracts. Universities and technical colleges would be invited to establish dedicated maritime engineering courses, while apprenticeships would provide pathways into skilled industrial employment for people who have understandably concluded that Britain’s contemporary economy offers them very little.

This brings us to perhaps the most socially attractive element of the proposal. Large sections of the traditional British working class have suffered from decades of industrial decline, accompanied by the replacement of skilled and comparatively well-remunerated manufacturing employment with insecure service-sector jobs. The disappearance of the great industries of northern England, Scotland and Wales was not merely an economic transformation. It was a cultural and psychological catastrophe for communities whose identities were bound up with the production of tangible objects and the transmission of industrial skills between generations. The loss of shipbuilding employment was particularly painful because shipyards traditionally represented an extraordinarily sophisticated combination of collective labour, technological knowledge and communal pride.

A national programme of naval reconstruction could help to reverse some of these consequences. The young man in an economically neglected coastal town who currently sees no attractive future in conventional employment might be offered an apprenticeship in welding, precision machining, electrical systems or marine propulsion. His qualifications would be nationally recognised, his employment conditions protected, and his salary sufficient to support a family. He would be participating in a national endeavour whose significance was immediately comprehensible. There is an important difference between being told that one is contributing to an abstract increase in gross domestic product and being able to point towards a completed warship leaving the harbour and explain that one helped to build her.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to romanticise industrial labour or imagine that unemployed workers could simply be marched into shipyards and instructed to assemble modern frigates. Naval construction is an extraordinarily demanding technological undertaking. It requires skilled engineers, sophisticated equipment, elaborate supply chains and rigorous systems of quality assurance. Nuclear submarine construction, in particular, is governed by exacting safety and security requirements. A serious maritime employment programme would therefore need to invest heavily in education and training, and it would have to offer attractive opportunities to people already employed elsewhere in the economy. The expansion of the defence nuclear enterprise, including investment in workforce development and industrial capacity at Barrow and Raynesway, illustrates precisely the sorts of initiatives that a broader national mobilisation programme would need to accelerate.

Immigration could play a constructive role in this endeavour, and there is no necessary contradiction between the restoration of working-class employment and the productive integration of immigrants into British society. Indeed, one of the more intellectually impoverished features of contemporary British political debate is the assumption that opportunities for British-born workers and opportunities for immigrant workers must invariably be mutually exclusive. A sophisticated shipbuilding industry requires a wide range of talents. Immigrant engineers, electricians, technicians, construction workers and other skilled employees could contribute valuable capabilities to the expansion of maritime production, while British apprentices acquired the specialised skills necessary for the next generation of naval construction. There would be legitimate requirements for immigration compliance, security vetting and restrictions upon access to particularly sensitive defence technologies. These ought to be treated as questions of national security and professional competence, rather than as arguments for excluding people simply because they were born elsewhere.

Indeed, a national maritime programme might provide an opportunity to construct a more persuasive social settlement between Britain’s established working-class communities and her immigrant population. Both groups would be invited to participate in a common productive endeavour whose benefits were tangible, locally distributed and publicly recognised. Their children might attend the same technical colleges, their families might live in the same expanding industrial towns, and their professional opportunities might depend upon shared competence rather than competing claims of identity. Such an arrangement would require strong labour standards to prevent employers using migrant labour to undercut wages, together with serious investment in housing, public services and local infrastructure. Properly managed, however, the expansion of maritime industry could contribute to a restoration of social cohesion in communities where economic stagnation has encouraged mutual suspicion.

The financial architecture of such a programme would be crucial. There is no compelling reason why the entire enterprise should be financed through unrestricted monetary creation, and considerable danger in attempting to do so. Britain already faces pressures arising from inflation, public indebtedness and borrowing costs. Creating unlimited amounts of sterling to purchase ships, without regard to the capacity of the economy to produce them, would risk undermining the purchasing power of the very wages that the programme was designed to provide. Modern warships also depend upon complex international supply chains, so any substantial depreciation of sterling would increase the cost of imported machinery, electronics and other equipment. The Bank of England’s independence should not be casually sacrificed to the proposition that government expenditure can always be financed painlessly through the creation of additional money.

A more credible arrangement would combine conventional long-term government borrowing, industrial investment, taxation where appropriate, and carefully limited monetary accommodation where spare economic capacity justified it. Parliament might establish a dedicated Maritime Reconstruction Fund, authorised to enter into long-term procurement and investment agreements but subject to independent financial and industrial oversight. Its expenditures could be structured to expand progressively as new shipyards, training facilities and supply chains became operational. The Bank of England would retain responsibility for price stability, rather than being compelled to finance whatever naval ambitions occurred to ministers. The essential innovation would be to recognise strategic industrial investment as a long-term national priority, rather than treating shipbuilding as an endlessly negotiable residual item within annual public expenditure disputes.

There would also have to be ruthless attention to procurement efficiency. The history of British defence acquisition contains enough expensive disappointments to justify considerable scepticism about the proposition that giving the Ministry of Defence substantially more money would automatically produce substantially more military capability. Large guaranteed contracts can encourage investment, but they can also protect inefficiency and create powerful vested interests. A maritime reconstruction programme would therefore require competition wherever practicable, transparent scrutiny of expenditure, realistic technological specifications and an industrial policy that rewarded ships delivered and maintained rather than merely announcements made. Equally importantly, Britain would need to abandon the practice of allowing elaborate procurement cycles to stretch across so many years that sophisticated military equipment risks becoming partially obsolete before it enters service.

The distinction between building warships and possessing a useful navy must also be kept firmly in mind. Warships require sailors, engineers, ammunition, spare parts, maintenance facilities and continuous training. The Royal Navy has experienced persistent difficulties in recruitment and retention, while maintaining the availability of existing vessels has proved challenging. Producing additional ships without expanding the trained personnel and support infrastructure necessary to operate them would merely exchange one form of military weakness for another. The objectives should therefore include recruitment and retention, adequate pay, reliable maintenance, increased ammunition stocks and the capacity to sustain prolonged operations in demanding maritime conditions.

Nor should Britain confuse the restoration of naval power with an ambition to recreate the Royal Navy of Queen Victoria. The purpose of maritime supremacy has changed, as have the weapons through which it is achieved. Britain does not need to engage in a competition with the United States or China over the number of aircraft carriers or destroyers she possesses. Her most pressing naval responsibilities lie in protecting the British Isles, securing North Atlantic communications, contributing to NATO’s collective defence, and denying Russia the ability to threaten the maritime infrastructure upon which European prosperity depends. A fleet of sophisticated anti-submarine frigates, supported by attack submarines, maritime patrol aircraft, autonomous surveillance systems and properly protected logistical vessels, might prove substantially more useful than a collection of enormous prestige warships designed primarily to impress visiting foreign dignitaries.

There is another important lesson to be drawn from Ukraine’s war against Russia. Ukraine, notwithstanding her limited conventional naval resources, has demonstrated how maritime drones, missiles and imaginative operational methods can impose substantial costs upon a much larger naval opponent. Britain’s future naval strength should therefore rest upon the combination of traditional shipbuilding excellence and technological innovation. The great shipyards should not simply reproduce the vessels of the previous generation in ever larger numbers. They should become centres of innovation, integrating artificial intelligence, autonomous navigation, advanced sensors and inexpensive expendable systems into an increasingly flexible naval architecture. The objective should be to make the Russian navy reluctant to venture into waters where British and allied surveillance and defensive capabilities are concentrated, rather than simply to construct an impressive inventory of expensive floating assets.

This is also why naval reconstruction might generate civilian economic benefits substantially beyond the defence sector itself. Shipbuilding is an industry that draws together numerous branches of engineering, materials science, computing, logistics and industrial management. Advances achieved in military propulsion, autonomous navigation or advanced manufacturing can generate applications in commercial shipping, offshore energy, oceanographic research and other maritime industries. The expertise developed in shipyards may therefore contribute to wider improvements in British industrial productivity. Such benefits should not be assumed automatically, and military production is not inherently more economically valuable than civilian production. Nevertheless, properly structured public investment in strategically important technologies can create productive capabilities that persist long after an individual warship has been completed.

The argument becomes more compelling when considered in the context of Britain’s relations with Russia. The Kremlin has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to exploit weaknesses in the European security architecture, including military, economic, technological and informational vulnerabilities. A Britain possessing a substantially larger and more capable navy would be able to contribute more decisively to the defence of Northern Europe and the North Atlantic. She would strengthen NATO’s collective deterrence, reduce opportunities for Russian coercion, and provide an additional measure of assurance to European allies who increasingly question the reliability of long-term American strategic commitments. Naval reconstruction should therefore be understood not as an invitation to seek military confrontation with Russia, but as an investment in making such confrontation less likely by raising the potential costs of Russian aggression.

There is something especially appealing about the idea that Britain might confront the Russian threat not principally through ever more rhetorical denunciations from Westminster, but through the quiet and systematic reconstruction of her industrial strength. An authoritarian government whose legitimacy depends in part upon the projection of military power is unlikely to be particularly impressed by another British minister declaring that Russian aggression is unacceptable. It might, however, attach rather greater importance to the steady expansion of British anti-submarine capabilities, the construction of new naval vessels, the strengthening of European maritime cooperation and the emergence of an industrial capacity capable of replacing military losses if a serious conflict were ever to occur. Deterrence ultimately depends upon capabilities and credibility rather than the volume of diplomatic indignation.

The greatest obstacle to this project may therefore be neither financial nor technological but political. Contemporary British government has developed an unfortunate habit of treating ambitious national undertakings as inherently suspicious. Large infrastructure projects become mired in planning disputes, procurement controversies, fiscal arguments and changes of ministerial direction. Industrial policy is announced with enthusiasm and then modified, delayed or abandoned when another department discovers a more immediately pressing claim upon public resources. The reconstruction of British naval power would require a degree of institutional patience that modern British politics has frequently struggled to demonstrate. Shipbuilding cannot be organised around the electoral calendar, and the training of a generation of marine engineers cannot be completed within the duration of a ministerial appointment.

This is where monetary sovereignty acquires its deeper significance. The ability of the British state to issue her own currency does not abolish economic scarcity, and it certainly does not entitle politicians to disregard inflation, productivity or exchange rates. It does, however, mean that Britain has greater freedom to organise long-term productive investment than the familiar analogy between government and household finances would suggest. The serious question is not whether Britain can conjure unlimited physical resources into existence through the creation of electronic money. Plainly she cannot. The question is whether Britain is presently making sufficient use of the resources she possesses, and whether a sustained programme of public investment could expand those resources sufficiently to restore capabilities that have been allowed to decline.

The answer is that such a programme could succeed, provided that the creation of money remained subordinate to the creation of genuine productive capacity. The state cannot print skilled shipwrights, but it can finance their training. It cannot print steel, but it can support the industrial infrastructure necessary for steel production and fabrication. It cannot print operational warships, but it can provide the long-term financial certainty upon which successful shipbuilding depends. It cannot print national confidence, but it can restore some of the material foundations from which confidence historically emerged. Money is an instrument through which people and resources are organised, rather than a substitute for the productive activity that gives those resources their value.

Perhaps, then, the proposition that Britain should print money, employ her disaffected working class alongside her immigrant population, build an enormous new navy and see off the Russians is not quite as eccentric as it initially sounds. It requires qualifications, institutional safeguards, technological sophistication and a realistic appreciation of economic constraints. It must also be accompanied by an understanding that maritime strength is not measured by the number of hulls launched to the accompaniment of patriotic music. But beneath the deliberate simplicity of the proposition lies a serious economic and strategic insight: Britain may be unnecessarily constraining her ability to undertake nationally important projects because her political institutions have become more accustomed to managing decline than organising productive ambition.

Britain once understood that national strength depended upon the relationship between industrial competence, maritime power and political determination. Her shipyards were not merely places of employment. They were institutions through which she transformed engineering knowledge and collective labour into strategic influence. Restoring something of that tradition would require more than monetary experimentation, and certainly more than nostalgia for the days when the White Ensign was visible in virtually every ocean. It would require Britain to rediscover a belief in her capacity to undertake difficult, expensive and enduring national projects. The money can be created, the workers can be trained, and the ships can be built, although none of these undertakings would be effortless or free of economic cost.

The Russians need not fear the sight of the British Treasury purchasing another supply of banknotes. They might, however, have good reason to reconsider their maritime ambitions if, a decade from now, the shipyards of Britain were once again producing a formidable succession of warships, submarines and autonomous vessels, crewed and supported by a skilled population whose livelihoods and national pride had been revitalised by the endeavour. The ultimate measure of Britain’s greatness would not be the quantity of money created to finance this transformation, but the industrial and military capabilities that she had succeeded in bringing into existence.

There is no particular shortage of sterling in the world. What Britain needs to rediscover is the confidence to turn it into ships.