I cannot wait for Starmer to announce that he's instituting conscription to send a "peace-keeping" force to Ukraine. This thread will be lit, while the rest of British society gladly sends their children off to be incinerated by FABs.
The British Army is incapable of increasing in size. Even if it had thousands of recruits, it wouldn't be able to train them beyond the basic core military syllabus. It's hard to explain to people that have never experienced the Army but they have ways of doing things, and the country could be in flames and they wouldn't change.
The Army wants more funding but it's for various pet projects, few of which actually contribute to the defence of the UK. They sold off the small arms stockpiles under blair, and tried to incorporate cobination of Just-in-Time Logistics and Lean Engineering philosophies into service support roles. Which is why most troops spent their time sitting in camp or doing low level small unit exercises. With maybe one large annual exercise which is just basically carefully choreographed theatre designed to get officers a good annual report.
Then there's shit like this
Because the army has such a large proportion of officers to enlisted, they love bullshit like map exercises. They also have non deployable units that they can shove officers into. They used to turn up to foreign deployments with 'HQ elements' and the vague promise of troops in the future.
Incidentally don't believe for a fucking minute that they British Army is viewed with awe by our allies. I worked with the US and Danes and after the battle of Bastion (when the RAF waved a load of taliban onto Bastion MOB) the open contempt started to come more to the fore.
I remember a bunch of American visiting the NAAFI built in camp Bastion. No expence spared, looked exactly like a large spar shop that you'd see in the UK. They walked around the empty shelves laughing, all they had in stock was duty free, perfumes and over priced crap. Anything the troops needed you'd have to go to the American PX or the Danish one (before they banned Britis).
Anyway long rant short, if there's a peacekeeping mission it'll be like UNIFIL, they'll pay a bunch of third world nations and a few smaller western ones to do it.