Al Carns@AlistairCarns
THE FIVE TESTS
For weeks I've argued that this party, and this country, needs a proper debate about where we go next. Not a reshuffle. Not a few degrees of course correction. The big, difficult, honest choices we've spent thirty years avoiding.
A few people have asked me what that debate should actually be about. Fair enough. I spent 24 years in the Marines and two in government, and I resigned because I couldn't win the argument I believed in from the inside. So let me make it here, plainly.
This isn't a manifesto, but a set of five tests. Anyone asking to lead our country should be able to look down this list and say yes to all five.
1️⃣ The Frontline Test
Do we give the people on the frontline the kit they need to do the job, and stand by them when the job is done?
I joined the Marines at 18. I've buried friends. So I do take this one personally.
I sat in government and watched us write a defence plan for a world that no longer exists, discussed in rooms I was kept out of. A 100k drone is now sinking warships that cost a billion. That is the reality of the wars being fought right now.
Passing this means 3% of GDP as the floor, not the ceiling. Buying for the next war, not the last. And fixing the Legacy Act so blokes in their seventies aren't back in the dock for what they were cleared of decades ago.
2️⃣ The Next-Generation Test
Are we handing the next generation a better deal than the one we inherited, or a worse one?
I'm a lad from a tough part of Aberdeen. My mum raised five of us through some bleak years. The only reason I got out was because I was given an opportunity. That cannot be said for young people today.
Nearly a million young people, around one in eight, are now outside work, education or training. That isn't their failure. It's ours.
Fixing this means a NEETs and youth unemployment target with a date, the youth guarantee delivered not just announced. Restoring the link between work and a decent life for the under 30s, on housing, wages and opportunity. Skills and apprenticeship numbers that beat the last government, not just match it.
Talent is everywhere in this country. Opportunity isn't. Fix that and you fix half of everything else...
3️⃣ The Trillion-Pound Test
Is the plan to add a trillion pounds to what Britain earns, or to manage the decline more politely?
Here's the lesson I learned from Ukraine and in government, and it never changes. We invent things. Other countries build them. Other countries decide. We're brilliant at the first mile and absent for the next ninety nine.
So set a target and be judged on it. A trillion pounds added to our GDP within a decade. Yes, it's ambitious. We should be ambitious!
Getting there means backing the high tech inventors just as much as the high street traders. Your local coffee shop shouldn't be paying more tax per cappuccino than Starbucks does. So why on earth do they?
It means an industrial strategy worth the name. Things to make and things to sell, in Barrow, in Derby, in every region. Our industrial base is national security, so we should fund it like it.
And it means building the chips and the compute here, not inventing the breakthrough and watching someone else scale it. Data is the new gunpowder.
4️⃣ The 10% Test
Can we make the country work 10% better, instead of only ever asking for 10% more?
I saw this from the inside. We patch the symptom this year, but the bill grows next year, and we end up paying for failure at the most expensive end of every system.
A 10% improvement in outcomes across a handful of our biggest problems, ill health, reoffending, wasted potential, would free up somewhere between £40 and £60 billion a year. We're already paying those costs. We just pay them too late, when they're at their worst.
Passing this means investing early instead of paying far more later, and having the honesty to admit that not every pound we spend today delivers an immediate return.
5️⃣ The Lights-On Test
Does our energy policy keep the lights on, the bills down and factories open, or do we keep chasing a target and hope the rest sorts itself out?
For years we've treated net zero as the only goal, and everything else, your bill, our industry, whether the grid even stays up, as a problem for later. That’s the wrong way around.
Make energy security the goal. Power that people, businesses, and industry can afford, and a grid that stays on when someone tries to switch it off. Do that and net zero follows. Chase the target on its own, and you end up with neither.
Passing this means a serious baseload, nuclear and the North Sea, built in time to matter. Strong countries have cheap, secure energy. Weak countries don't.
None of this is complicated. It's the oldest deal there is. You serve the country, the country stands by you. In uniform, in a hospital, in a classroom, on a building site. Right now that deal is broken, and everyone keeping our country going can feel it.
That broken deal is the real reason for the frustration out there. It's why trust has drained out of politics. And it's why our party that won a landslide is, halfway through the term, already arguing about who leads it.
But changing the person at the top fixes nothing if we don't fix the deal underneath. Swap one leader for another and leave the deal broken, and we'll be right back here in eighteen months, asking the same question all over again.
So I'm not interested in who gets what job. I'm interested in whether we've got the courage to pass these tests.
We've been promised a debate. This is my opening offer to it. And if that debate ever becomes a contest, it should be fought on this ground, not on personalities.
I know where I stand.
