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🚨Lord George Robertson - a former Labour defence secretary who wrote the prime minister’s defence review - just made a hugely consequential intervention🚨
He wants to trigger a national conversation on the need for the UK to rebuild its defences. And he wants words by the government about boosting defence spending to become far more urgent and decisive action. Defence also needs to become a cross- party issue as these perilous times mean political point scoring is a luxury we can’t afford.
Here are some main points.
As well as talking about Sir Keir Starmer’s “corrosive complacency” on defence and that the UK is underprepared for war, Lord George Robertson in his speech:
🚨Directly calls out the prime minister for failing to match his pledges to rearm with the money to make it happen. For example, he notes how the PM wrote in a newspaper article about how the Iran war needs to be a line in the sand for the UK to strengthen its defences but Lord Robertson says “the wherewithal to make all of this happen was absent”
🚨He urges for defence to become an all of country issue, to take the politics out of it and for all political parties to work together. “There is an urgency about the threat which renders political point scoring to be a dangerous luxury”.
🚨He makes a strong case to switch funding away from welfare and into warfare. Lord Robertson says welfare spending is 5x that of defence. “Are we certain that this is the right priority - jeopardising safety and security whilst maintaining an increasingly unsustainable welfare bill?”
🚨He underlines that NATO has said Russia could be ready to use military force against the alliance by the end of the decade - that is just three years away. “That is a very short period of time and it should scare us all”… “That is sobering and frightening by any standard”
🚨He says this call to transform the armed forces is about so much more than investing in more warships and jets. It is about much wider readiness. “We are simply not ready. We need to rebuild our readiness in order to deter and possible adversary.
🚨Deterrence is much cheaper than war. The UK paid off its final debt from World War 2 in 2016 - when it was on the winning side!
🚨Lord Robertson says the government needs to abandon the “lethargic thought process of the post Cold War” era and instead get onto a proper war footing like Ukraine
🚨Finally, Lord Robertson says there has to be a national conversation on defence - something that Sir Keir Starmer said would happen 18 months ago. The public needs to understand the threat and to realise that there will have to be some difficult spending choices made for the UK genuinely to bolster its security in a “very very turbulent world”.
🚨He finishes by saying: “We need the whole country to wake up. The clock is ticking”
English
