Emma Burrows

EXCLUSIVE: A mere 6% of people in the UK would volunteer to fight for the country in the face of an imminent invasion, a new @YouGov survey has revealed. A further 14% of Britons would agree to serve if called up, but 17% said they would refuse any order to defend their homeland, while a whopping 52% of people polled said they would be ineligible because of age or disability. As for the chances of war, the survey - shared exclusively with @SkyNews, found that almost one third of people - 29% - said they believe it is likely the UK will come under a full-scale military attack within the next decade. By contrast, the majority of respondents - 51% - described such a threat as unlikely. They will hope that they are right as the poll exposed a lack of confidence in the ability of the military to keep the UK safe should the worst happen. Some 53% of people said they were not confident their armed forces are strong enough to defend the country against an attack, while just over one third - 38% - said they were. In another interesting finding, the survey discovered that an overwhelming majority of the British public - 57% - believe the government is spending too little on defence. A mere 6% said they thought the defence budget was too big. However, there was no agreement among the more than 2,300 British people surveyed on where any extra money to invest in the armed forces should come from. More than half said they opposed funding a bigger defence budget by raising taxes, reducing expenditure in public services or by borrowing more. The poll was conducted in June following the publication of a new defence investment plan that Sir Keir Starmer’s government failed sufficiently to fund, leaving at least a £5bn blackhole for the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, to fill. Successive governments have reduced spending on defence since the end of the Cold War as they shifted resources into peacetime priorities such as health, welfare and education. But politicians across Europe now say the so-called “peace dividend” is over following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yet a switch back to spending a much larger chunk of national wealth once again on defence has yet to happen in Britain. YouGov also polled people in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France and Poland as part of its survey. Everyone was asked what they viewed as the biggest global threat from a list of options, which included a military attack but that only came out on top in Poland. Britons, Canadians and French cited climate change; Germans said mass migration; Americans said political extremism; and Australians said religious terrorism. Opinion was also divided on which country posed the biggest threat to world peace. The UK and other European nations said Russia but ranked the United States second. For the Australians and Canadians this order was reversed, with the US seen as a greater threat to peace than Russia. In the US, the biggest threat was seen as Iran. As for whether countries think the US is a force for good in the world with Donald Trump as president, the overwhelming view was no, it has become a “force for bad”. news.sky.com/video/poll-sugg…