Mr Speaker set him up with an easy starter: Dr Luke Evans (Con) facing Sir Keir with familiar Budget teases about the Winter Fuel Allowance, IHT on farmers and the employers’ NIC hit on GPs, care homes and hospices. Answer: the £22 billion ‘black hole,’ money thrown into the NHS and two million extra medical appointments.
It’s like Pelmanism, but where you don’t have to pair the cards.
The PM’s feelings were soothed - not that they had been much ruffled - by a Savlon query from Labour’s Alex McIntyre: would he agree that the Government was ‘delivering opportunity for the next generation’ with breakfast clubs and a bit of childcare funding? Blow us down, he would!
The Leader of the Opposition opened with Ukraine, an issue where (as previously with Brexit) the two sides of the House have an unfortunate tendency to agree, as indeed does the so-called right-wing Press (Peter Hitchens being an honourable exception.)
There was talk of sovereignty and (the time-expired) Zelensky’s right to be at the negotiating table. Later in this session, Dr Neil Hudson (Con) likened Zel to Churchill in that both had suspended elections in wartime. [Perhaps Angela ‘Winnie’ Rayner can light up a Romeo y Julieta to celebrate scrubbing those local council polls? It’s all part of our becoming a People’s Democratic Republic.]
Steve Race (Labour) wanted us to ‘redouble our efforts… to help secure Ukraine’s future as a free, democratic and sovereign European nation.’ Did that last adjective imply NATO membership? Funny how in 1949 it was truly vitally necessary to defend against Communist expansionism but now we need to restrain the growth of a Eurocommunist bloc that, as Mr Vance told it, no longer shares America’s liberal Western values.
Starmer gave muddy replies on spending but Badenoch failed to pierce the murk. She congratulated him on accepting her advice to cut foreign aid but he said he had not even seen her proposal. More embarrassing for him was Diane Abbott’s point that using aid and development money for armaments and tanks increased desperation and poverty and made people less safe; Sir Keir gave the usual kind of response - difficult decision, will do more when we can.
Kemi tried again: how did the PM reconcile his figure of a £13.4 billion increase in defence expenditure with the Defence Secretary’s £6 billion stated that morning? Sir Keir said it was the difference between this fiscal year (2024/25) and (2027/28) - reminiscent of Gordon Brown, somehow. Kemi repeated the query and received a patronising repetition.
She went on to probe whether money for the Chagos deal was coming out of the expanded pot, something the Defence Secretary had failed to say. Starmer’s turbid reply was that the extra spend was ‘for our capability on defence and security in Europe’ - an ambiguous response given he then asserted it was ‘for our capability.’
He continued, ‘The Chagos deal is extremely important for our security and for US security, and the US is rightly looking at it.’ Important, yes; but helpful, that is another matter. Senator John Kennedy has given a crystal-clear exposition of the Chagos business in advance of Starmer’s visit to Washington, remarking that if the latter wants to assuage his post-colonial guilt he should buy himself an emotional support pony. Giving away Diego Garcia with its military base to Mauritius helps China’s power in the Indian Ocean; so much for our security.
Dr Kieran Mullan (Con) eventually got the chance to pose the question again: ‘will he rule out funding any Chagos deal from the defence budget—yes or no?’ He too got an opaque answer: ‘the money yesterday was allocated to aid our capability and is the single biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war.’
Ed Davey (Lib Dem leader) urged the PM to work with the EU to create ‘a new European rearmament bank’ as per the proposal from the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, he who previously had ‘a special place in Hell’ for Brexiteers. Starmer prevaricated.
Jeremy Hunt (Con) weighed in with ‘our biggest single foreign policy priority is the preservation of NATO with America at its heart’ plus the need to ‘spend 3% of GDP on defence within a specified timescale.’ Sir Keir agreed, saying ‘Putin thought he could weaken NATO. He has only made it stronger and larger.’
So important to have an enemy. And to forget a lot of inconvenient history.
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