Brief summary
The discussion centers around the upcoming UK defense review, with the government promising to build new munitions factories and send a “crunchy message” to Moscow. There is debate around the political implications, with the government trying to make defense spending a domestic issue by linking it to jobs and security. However, there are questions about how radical the plans will be and whether the government will commit to the NATO-recommended 3.5% of GDP for defense spending. The conversation also touches on the differing public attitudes towards defense between the UK and Poland, and the potential need for a “whole society approach” to defense in the UK. Additionally, the news covers Conservative MP Robert Jenrick’s video confronting fare dodgers, which has generated significant attention, and the ongoing debate around the Conservatives’ record on issues like policing and prisons.
Main text
00:00:00
Paddy, I’ve got a present for you. Yep. Oh, a clapperboard. It’s a clapperboard. If you’re listening, not watching, for some reason, I have no idea, we have a newscast clapperboard with us today. That’s got Adam Fleming written all over it. I mean. Maybe they’re just trying to, because it’s like giving me a toy to play with, so I’ll shut up. Maybe that’s it. After our Bond chat yesterday, who do we think would be the next Bond, Henry? Well, isn’t the point that it’s going to take years and years and years? It’s going to be someone we haven’t even heard of yet. Well, Jack Laundon, I’m going to say Jack Laundon because he was on the show not long ago and we asked him about it and he said, ‘Ah, maybe I’ll be the first Ginger Bond.
00:00:39
Yeah. But there does seem to be a bit of intrigue because partly because Amazon’s bought the franchise, right? So they have to work out what it’s going to be about, who it’s going to be. Is it now going to be a big American corporate monolith? Ginger Bond sounds like a biscuit. That’s a nice one, doesn’t it? Where you’d go, snap, have it with a cup of tea. So we were talking about the next Bond because we were talking to the former chief spy and that was because of the defence review. It wasn’t all accidental, but we’ll get underway with what everyone has said in the news world on Sunday’s newscast. Hello, it’s Paddy in the studio. It’s Laura in the studio. And it’s Henry at home. So, the news.
00:01:21
Uh, there are I think two big bits of news about the upcoming defense review today. One is that the government is promising they’re going to build at least six new munitions factories making munitions and energetics, which by the way basically means explosives, but for some reason now the MOD calls them energetics. The other, I think, we got from John Healy when we were with him yesterday is he said that the review is not just about what they’re doing, industry, jobs, building up the army. It is also a message to Moscow, which kind of sounds like a movie, but it’s a pretty crunchy message, I think, for lots of people hearing that at home. And Henry, the headline is more bang, more buck. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really interesting to have.
00:02:06
The government talking today about factories and jobs in the context of this increased defence spending, because I think they know from all the time that Keir Starmer has spent in his first year as prime minister on foreign affairs and defence matters, that if they want to try to make this political, if they want the overwhelming majority of voters in the country to care. Beyond a sort of vague sense of all good that sounds like we might be safe then, they need to find a way to link it to what’s happening in the UK and I think that’s what we’ll hear more of tomorrow from the Prime Minister when he unveils the strategic defense review and it is going to be him putting himself at the heart of tomorrow rather than just John Healey who Laura spoke to today, and I think that’s an interesting call that the government has made to almost try to make this most undomestic of issues as domestic as possible.
00:02:59
And it’s interesting that that might even be required because traditionally, defence is something that actually doesn’t really kind of get the public going. And it’s not been a priority in Whitehall for our donkey years for reasons that we talked about yesterday and how the world, you know, the peace dividend and the Berlin Wall came down. But it is interesting from a political point of view that the government has been building up to this for a long time. Lots of tricky questions have been met with answers like ‘Well, we’ll have the defense review and you’ll see at that point.’ And they really are. They’re trying to make this a big moment, a sort of centerpiece, really. And it fits in widely, Paddy, to that thing we’ve talked about really since the new year is that this.
00:03:38
Threats around the world and what’s going on internationally have to an extent given Keir Starmer a script that maybe he didn’t have before. Talk about security and the concept of, yes, jobs, but safety and safety and a feeling of security that they know lots of people, maybe lots of newscasters, don’t necessarily feel about the UK anymore. Yes, because if you just think about the last few episodes, the financial crisis defined the Labour government. The pandemic defined the Tory government. The war in Europe could define Keir Starmer. And if you go back in history, as Henry loves to do, and even I know something about this, it was a Labour atom bomb. Attlee said, ‘I want the Union Jack on an atom bomb.’ So Labour doesn’t have to be fought at by the Tories saying, ‘You guys don’t like defence.’ The history shows that Labour’s been there as much as the Tories.
00:04:29
It does, but there’s a tension in the modern Labour Party around this. And you see this in a big way if you think about their sort of, I suppose, progressive, for want of a better word, the sort of trendy metropolitan progressive bit of the Labour Party, that sort of activist base, or what other people might say is a more traditional flag family, NATO. When Keir Starmer was leader of the opposition, we went with him on his first visit to NATO HQ, where he sat down in front of a Union Jack from memory, pointing out the Labour Prime Minister’s signature on the founding documents of NATO and saying, ‘Jeremy Corbyn was wrong about this.’ I am going to take a different line. And that was a huge moment for him.
00:05:09
But it is quite a fault line inside the Labour movement. And I think not all Labour MPs are going to be sort of whooping and cheering when they hear and see the full details of this defence review tomorrow. But, Henry, one of the things I read in the Sunday Times interview is John Healy saying, oh, no, sorry, in the Mail on Sunday article that he penned himself, is that the defence dividend will be felt in Barrow and Derby. The factories will create 1,000 jobs. So there is a kind of read-through, what Laura’s saying, is that there is a growth argument about defence spending. That is certainly the one we’re going to hear them make it for sure, because I guess what distinguishes the war in Europe as a defining feature of Keir Starmer’s government, as you put it, Paddy, from the global financial crisis defining Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s perhaps and the pandemic defining Boris Johnson’s, is that it’s a bit more abstract for most people in the UK.
00:06:05
It’s not something that everyone is being touched by. The government would make an argument that actually they are, that that’s at the heart of inflation, that’s at the heart of the cost of living pressures and so on. But it just requires that extra bit of explanation. So what I think the government is trying to do is make that connection for people and make the connection between their response and people’s lives and the ways in which they hope to improve the economy. But also, let’s be under no illusions. You talk to people in Downing Street and they say the Prime Minister is loving, if that doesn’t sound too dry a word, being on the world stage. He relishes the opportunity to have these kinds of conversations with fellow world leaders to do strategic thinking about defence.
00:06:45
But they know in his team that whether he gets a second term as Prime Minister to spend on the world stage is going to generally be determined by the health of the UK economy at the end of his first term. It’s interesting to ponder just how radical though these plans are going to be. And I think that’s where a lot of the criticism or scrutiny will be tomorrow. How radical are these plans that Keir Starmer has actually enjoyed being part of making going to be? One of the suggestions on the front of the Sunday Times today is that the government wants to buy American fighter jets that could theoretically carry nuclear weapons. To be clear, it’s a very interesting story, but that’s not saying they’re going to order new nuclear weapons.
00:07:24
That’s a different thing. This is about buying jets that would be able to carry nuclear missiles, which actually some NATO countries already have. But John Healey, nonetheless, was quite tight-lipped about that when we asked him this morning. I want to make a broader point about the nuclear deterrent, which is this. For over 70 years, our UK nuclear deterrent has been the ultimate guarantee of security in this country. It’s what Putin fears most. And we are the only nation in NATO that commits our nuclear deterrent in full to the defence of other NATO allies. And strong deterrence is absolutely vital to keep us and our NATO allies safe. What’s tricky, though, when you talk about anything in defense is that any big, exciting, major product project comes with an absolutely enormous, thinking great price tag.
00:08:22
And there’s quite a lot of chatter in the sort of defence community that actually, look, this shouldn’t really be about the big projects. Look at what’s happened in Ukraine. Small projects, drones that you can almost buy off the shelf, adapted quickly, speed, new technology, not signing the dotted line on projects that might take five, ten years to purchase. And I also just think, we touched on it a little bit yesterday, but I wonder, Henry, what you think about this. In a few weeks’ time, NATO. Which this country says it wants to lead, NATO’s our priority, is going to call on countries to spend significantly more than the UK is planning to spend on defence, 3. 5% on hard defence spending. And we asked John Healy about this.
00:09:06
This morning, I’m paraphrasing, but, you know, you’re having this big bang announcement now. You say it’s a huge deal, but you’re not committing to anything like NATO is going to call on you to do. And what he also wouldn’t commit to is this idea that the Treasury has actually said, yeah, sure, we will spend 3% on defence by the end of the next parliament, which John Healy says, oh, I’ve got no doubt that will happen. But he hasn’t got a guarantee from the Treasury. And if you haven’t got a guarantee from the Treasury, you can’t be sure at all that it’s going to happen. Totally, and I think that’ll be a big vein of criticism of this government’s approach over the coming days right up through to that NATO conference which I think is at The Hague.
00:09:43
I think I think the I think what underlies all of that though is a recognition that isn’t really being articulated but I think I’ll be interested in I think we would probably all agree on and I think basically every politician privately will agree on: defense spending is only going to go up and up and up for the foreseeable coming years, coming decades perhaps, given the end of the sort of century of assumptions about the American guarantees of security and Russia, and so on. And so in that context, it’s quite easy for a lot of this actually very immediately to sound quite trivial. You know, there was a brief argument on your panel, Laura, between Simon Case and Shami Chakrabarti about some of this defense spending being paid for by foreign aid.
00:10:29
I mean, much more profound things are going to have to be. I mean, obviously, supporters of foreign aid would say that’s profound, but much more. I guess, domestically painful things than foreign aid are going to have to be cut back on in government expenditure to fund the increase in defence spending if they merely get to that 3%, which John Heaney says is inevitable. So, if we think of a country that’s going to be spending 5%, the country in NATO with the biggest share of GDP spent on defence, it’s Poland. Now, we were exploring the difference between the Polish public’s view of threat and the British public view of threat. And the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski of Poland, and told me it’s hospitals and bullets, not hospitals or bullets.
00:11:11
So it’s a bigger take. And here’s what he said in answer to the question, how would you, and he was educated here, how would you compare the attitudes of the British public with the Polish? The difference is that we were a Russian colony in the 19th century, and we don’t have a natural physical barrier. Neither are we an island, nor do we have the atom bombs. So, yes, we feel much more vulnerable. You have to persuade people in a democracy to see it your way. How difficult is it to get the public to want to spend instead of hospitals on bullets? Well, here there is a fundamental political difference between Poland and Britain. I’ve discussed this with a very capable finance minister, Andrzej Domański, and he’s asked this question by his colleagues, other finance ministers, and he explained to them that he would be in political trouble if he didn’t spend enough on the military.
00:12:13
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? It’s such a different mindset. And I remember going to Poland and sitting down with politicians there and talking about the threat from Russia. And even when you’re physically in that place, it feels different because you know you’re just talking about a couple of hundred miles. And one thing I think will come out of the review tomorrow is this concept that in this country, the government now wants what they’re going to call, I think, a whole society approach. So, saying that people must be more conscious of. They must be more vigilant. They want more people to join the reserves. They want more people to join the cadets. They’re going to bring back something like the Home Guard, not like Dad’s Army, but a modern version.
00:12:52
John Healy’s son is in the reserves. Yeah. And he’s out in the Sunday Times saying we need a reset of the contract, which is the word that’s always used between the public and our military. And our guest yesterday, Sir Alex Youngo, if you still haven’t heard him, you can get him on the Saturday newscast. He’s on the record publicly saying. The British treat the army like the English fans treat the English football team. You watch it on the telly and they’re over there. And that’s the attitude that people are talking about when they say, does the British mindset need to change? You can talk about what’s on the battlefield and then you can talk about what’s in our minds. Henry, it’s a very interesting new public conversation headed our way.
00:13:37
And there’ll be lots of newscasters who say, hang on, actually, I rather prefer jaw-jaw to war-war. Thanks. Yeah, and I guess that is the question underlying that is, is the speed at which this conversation has moved in Westminster reflective of anything that’s actually happened more generally across the UK? Sure, people will be more aware of the vulnerability of Europe to Russia, perhaps post 2022. Does that necessarily mean that there is going to be an enthusiasm for some sort of home guard, as you put it, or an expansion of the reserves? I think the jury’s probably a little bit out on that. And I think the other thing, by the way, is that there is a real consensus between Labour and the Conservatives on defence.
00:14:23
They might disagree on some details, but there’s basically a consensus on the approach to go in. And this government picked up from the previous government when it came to you. Ukraine, openly so. But we’ve talked over so many newscasts, haven’t we, about on the left, more voters dissatisfied going to the Greens and going to independents, and on the right, dissatisfied voters going to reform, where there is no such consensus, where there are different views of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, or on the UK’s approach to Russia and Ukraine. So I think that is something worth bearing in mind as this conversation progresses, is that at the same time you have pollsters suggesting that fewer and fewer members of the public support the the sort of parameters within which that conversation is taking place.
00:15:08
What it also might mean if the government wants to shift the mindset and shift the money, if they want to hit the three percent target. Somebody who’s very helpfully shared something with me which actually shows some calculations from inside the Ministry of Defense about what that would mean and going to three percent, which is what John Healy says he’s confident will happen by 2034, which is obviously miles off and people will say it has to happen sooner than that. If you did it by 2032, then the total defense budget spend of 3% would be £98 billion. That’s nearly double what it is at the moment. It’s about £56 billion. So less than double, but not far off. And that’s with a rising welfare bill, a rising healthcare bill. Yeah.
00:15:55
And go on, you haven’t finished. And that’s going to 3%, not the three and a half that NATO is asking for. Which, as you say, Henry, I completely agree with you. I think every politician would say, yeah, the defence budget’s probably going to have to go up and up and up and up and up. There is the defence review in advance, because actually newscasters are going to get this tomorrow. They are, and we should also say, look, we don’t know everything that’s in it. We know quite a lot about in it. We know where the government’s trying to position themselves in advance of the review. We know why it’s important for the government, and we also know why it might not actually help the government that much, because making that link for voters about why this matters is something that’s not completely clear.
00:16:32
Completely straightforward. But it will be a big day. And Adam, of course, tomorrow will be covering it in full once we actually see the whites of their eyes. So let’s talk about the week in Tory party leadership news because Robert Jenrick made a video putting him front and centre about fair dodging. And, of course, he doesn’t like the Labour-run TfL, which is the London-based transport network. Most newscasters don’t live in London and anti-social behaviour happens in places run by Conservatives, can I just shock the world by saying, and in areas run by the Greens and in areas run by the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. So he’s not, there’s no unique flavour of anti-social behaviour, but he’s saying that fare dodging really makes him angry, and you had him on the show, but let’s just tee it up by listening to him in his own words, confronting people he thought didn’t like to bother themselves with paying.
00:17:30
Excuse me. Do you think it’s all right not to pay? Seriously, why do you go back to the barrier and pay? Do you want to go back and pay like everybody else? Do you think it’s all right not to pay? Why don’t you go back and pay? Now, do you remember last week we had a conversation and I slightly wonder if Robert Jenrick heard it, where we said opposition leaders sometimes might be wise to do things that are really surprising. In order to grab headlines and have some cut through. And you remember, we talked about David Cameron going to do the Huskies. We talked about various other things that opposition leaders have done in days gone by. And we said, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Kemi Badenoch hasn’t really done any of those kinds of really surprising things.
00:18:12
She’s made speeches. She’s published sort of big long term thinking, but she hasn’t done any surprising things. In walks Robert Jenrick doing something designed to make a point, but also. designed to get headlines and cut through and it really has i mean it really has i mean i think the last time i looked it was up to something like 12 million views on x i think it’ll be more than that by now I mean, you know, many of them won’t be in the UK. I don’t know how it’s measured and all of that. But, you know, you take that as an opposition party on just 120 MPs. You take that and then some. I mean, it has started a conversation.
00:18:50
I don’t know, by the way, if this is a massive coincidence, but obviously, as Paddy says, you know, most newscasters don’t live in London. I do live in London. And I’ve seen more fair dodging in the last year than I’ve ever seen in a lifetime of almost always living in London. But over the last two days, I. e., since Robert Jenrick’s video, I’ve seen something which I haven’t seen before, which is fair dodgers stopped at the ticket barriers at my local station by TFL enforcement people, which I do. I mean, that is merely one data point, and it may well be completely unrelated. But living in the world I do of Westminster, it does seem an extraordinary coincidence that that’s been visible twice since the Jenrick video.
00:19:33
Anyway, I’ll just leave you out there. That’ll teach you to fair dodge. They’re coming for you. They know now. They know your route. You know, there’s nothing wrong. People will want us to exert BBC impartiality. So let me go as far as I can to say this is what politicians can and should do. They should go to doorstep-able issues and they should be doorstep-ably saying things. If this is an interest of interest to the public, what is the criticism of what Robert Jenrick did? I think there’s a question to be posed about whether or not he’s encouraging people to be vigilantes. That’s not necessarily a risk-free thing to do. Is it a responsible thing for a politician to be encouraging people to go and confront people in the streets?
00:20:22
We asked him if he would do those sorts of things normally if there weren’t cameras following him. So I think there’s that. There was also criticism of one of the phrases he used. He talked about weird Turkish barbershops. He was making a point about people are fed up with fare dodging. They’re fed up with seeing shoplifters not be confronted. They’re fed up with weird Turkish barbershops. And many people read that and thought, hang on, that sounds like dog whistle racism. There is, even there was a BBC investigation that looked at Turkish style barbershops sometimes being used as fronts for money for illegal operations and drug dealing. So there’s a well-documented phenomenon around those kinds of properties and businesses. But he was attacked for raising those kinds of issues in the way that he did.
00:21:15
But as you say, Paddy, what he has done to great success is tap into an issue that many people feel, whatever their politics. You look around your town or you look around your city and you think, ‘Hang on a minute, there are things going on that I’m not happy about.’ And I think that his team will be feeling absolutely cock-a-hoop that they’ve had a huge hit. He came forward today with another policy that a lot of people will think, ‘Well, that’s pretty on the edge’ -arming prison officers and giving guns in some circumstances to people who are trying to keep the peace in prisons. So it’s another moment where you can see Robert Jenrick moving quickly, trying to provoke headlines, trying to provoke conversation in a way that his boss, Kevin Badenoch, is not managing to do.
00:22:01
And Henry, I know you and Chris wrote a long piece this week about whether or not Kevin Badenoch is part of the Tories’ problem. And Robert Jenrick will have illustrated to some people, will have given them, I think it’s made quite stark. What she’s not doing. What she’s not doing. His hyperactivity, whatever you think of it, he’s getting some hits in the political daily battle in a way that she is not. And one of the things that someone, I don’t think it made it into the piece, but someone who had not voted for Robert Jenrick for Conservative leader, who did not particularly like him or his brand of politics, said to me was that they, this MP, and a lot of their colleagues in a similar place.
00:22:44
Had had come to grudgingly respect his approach to opposition; they just said he was working harder and doing better, and they said a lot of people’s minds within the conservative party had been changed on him simply through his sort of industriousness. Having lost the leadership election and having been appointed shadow justice secretary, I think. The other thing you know you asked Paddy about the ways in which Robert Jenrick’s video has been criticized; I mean a big vein of criticism as it is for anything that any Conservative says at the moment about things that are wrong in this country as they perceive it is. Well, hang on, you were in power for 14 years. And what Robert Jenrick seems to have found a way to do is sort of throw out enough fresh stuff that, of course, that’s a response, but people are also having to engage with the things that he’s saying, and that’s not something others have necessarily cracked.
00:23:32
And just as a fact, what happened to policing numbers under 14 years of Conservative rule, Henry? Well, I can’t remember the precise numbers, but I think for a lot of it they went down and then latterly they were coming up again. Yeah, same with prison officers, right? You know, they built some new prison places, but they shut far more places. Latterly, they were trying to recruit more prison officers, but prison budgets were absolutely smashed, to use a colloquial phrase. Justice budget was smashed. So for some people, you know, generate coming out and saying, oh, well, actually, the answer right now to prisons being out of control is to give them guns in some situations. And I think a lot of people were watching and thought, well, maybe the answer actually was not to completely starve them of the cash they needed over a long period of time.
And it’s that balance, which is something it’s one of the sort of evolutions that’s going on in the background of all the politics that we talk about at this point. When do Labour stop saying, ‘Ah, the inheritance. It was all the fault. It was them what done it’? And when do the Tories manage to move away from that sort of shroud of many failures? And we had Simon Case on the program this morning, who was the top civil servant for many years under, you know, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and then the Keir Starmer transition. He was pretty clear that a lot of what the Tories left behind was incredibly difficult and was worse than Labour might have expected. You know, he says that as a neutral civil servant. He sort of says, in a way, fair enough for Labour to say that. The question for how long that that is justified and when do they really hold the conch is an interesting one. That’s more than enough for this Sunday’s newscast. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:24:17
FAQs
1. Defense Spending Commitment
Q: Is the Treasury guaranteeing the 3% GDP defense spending pledge mentioned by Defence Secretary John Healey?
A: No. Healey expressed confidence but admitted no binding commitment exists from the Treasury. Critics note this undermines credibility, especially as NATO may soon call for 3.5% spending.
2. Radicalism of UK Defense Plans
Q: How radical are Labour’s upcoming defense policies?
A: Ambitious but contentious. Plans include six new munitions factories, revitalized reservist programs (“modern Home Guard”), and exploring nuclear-capable jets. However:
- Critics argue focus should shift to rapid-response tech (e.g., drones) over decade-long projects.
- Significant internal Labour tension exists over prioritizing defense vs. domestic spending.
3. Robert Jenrick’s Opposition Strategy
Q: Is Jenrick’s confrontational approach (e.g., fare-dodging confrontations) effective for the Conservatives?
A: Yes for visibility, no for substance. His viral tactics (12M+ views) successfully tap into public frustration with crime/antisocial behavior. However:
- Criticisms: Accusations of encouraging vigilantism; referencing “weird Turkish barbershops” seen as divisive.
- Contrast with Badenoch: Jenrick’s hyperactive headline-grabbing highlights his rival’s more subdued, policy-focused style.
