It will take more than 3% to make Britain ‘battle ready'
Does anyone really think that spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence would make Britain 'battle-ready', as Keir Starmer claims? (Assuming, that is, that he really did spend all that money rather than merely have an aspiration to do so).
Here is the statistic of the day, to remind us of what a wartime economy really looks like. In 2023, according to the World Bank, Ukraine spent 36.7 per cent of its GDP on defence. And no, the reason that percentage is so high is not because Ukraine's GDP collapsed: on the contrary, Ukraine's GDP in 2023 was higher than in any year except the Covid rebound year of 2021, plus 2008 and 2013. Russia, in trying to roll over a smaller neighbour, spent 7 per cent of GDP on defence – or rather, on offence in its case.
No one is suggesting that it would be a sensible strategy for Britain to emulate Ukraine and spend a third or more of national output on defence at the moment.
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Telegraph
21 minutes ago
- Telegraph
I live in a UK beauty spot threatened by Labour's planning bill. It could become a disaster zone
The UK needs houses. The UK needs open spaces, and wilderness. The Labour government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which cleared its second reading in the House of Commons with a majority of 256 votes, is only interested in the former. At the end of 2024, Keir Starmer declared that homes must have a higher priority than nature and the environment, as ministers outlined reforms that could allow more building on England's green belt. Housing minister Angela Rayner backed him, asserting that 'we can't have a situation where a newt is more protected than people who desperately need housing'. The populist punditry that would once have been anathema to leaders and politicians in general is designed to detract from the dire consequences if the bill is passed. Lawyers, environmental charities – including the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts – and activists have assessed that more than 5,000 of England's most vulnerable protected natural habitats are at risk of being destroyed by development thanks to Labour's new planning bill, which has been dubbed a 'licence to kill'. These would include many of the UK's favourite holiday destinations, such as areas that fall under designations like Sites of Special Scientific Interest, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Special Protection Areas, Special Areas of Conservation, and much-loved nature-rich parts of National Parks and National Landscapes (formerly AONBs), like the New Forest and the Forest of Bowland. As I live in the Forest of Bowland, I have a stake in this debate. I live in a ribbon of farmland that lies between the Forest of Bowland proper and Pendle Hill, which is part of the same protected National Landscape. South of here is East Lancashire, one of the most densely populated parts of the UK. For residents of Burnley, Blackburn and Accrington, Bowland is the second nearest large green space, after the West Pennine Moors. But Bowland is different. As the 'Forest' in its name suggests it is a former hunting chase, and while there are some pockets of grouse moor management that still rile most ordinary residents and visitors, swathes of the park are open country, ideal for hiking, cycling and family picnics. For decades, access was complicated here, with grouse butts and private lands blocking walkers. Just two decades ago, much of Bowland was opened up to walkers for the first time when the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 gave general right of access to the public to 'access land' for the purposes of open-air recreation on foot. People can walk, run and – where permitted – ride bikes wherever there are paths. To be candid, Bowland doesn't have Instagram-friendly summits to bag or famous poets' houses to swoon over. It doesn't attract countless car-tourers or caravan-users. It is absolutely nothing like the Lake District or nearby Yorkshire Dales. Many of its upland areas are boggy and only the very well-acquainted would want to negotiate the steep-sided valleys or gully-riven, heather-clad slopes. But the relatively low visitor numbers are great for nature. A sizeable central section of the 300-square-mile National Landscape is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of the habitats it helps to protect and its internationally important bird populations. One of these is the merlin, the UK's smallest bird of prey (it's only about the size of a thrush). On my last visit I saw one at a distance, seated – ironically – on a grouse butt. During the same half-day visit I also spotted meadow pipits, curlews, skylarks, a stonechat, a greylag goose, and nesting peregrines. The most surprising sighting was a couple of ring ouzels – a red-listed species (that is, 'of high conservation concern') and members of the thrush family that dwells on the uplands. The absolute high point was the bird for which Bowland had become famous: the hen harrier. At first I saw males and females skimming across the top of the heather. This was satisfying enough; hen harriers are among the most persecuted birds in the country. Then I was treated to a sky dance, which is when a male hen harrier performs extraordinary aerial stunts to show off to females, to warn off rival males, or – perhaps – just for fun. The one I saw did Red Arrows-style vertical leaps, back flips, twists and turns, against a clear blue sky. It was one of those moments in nature, all of five minutes, that felt life-enhancing and deeply moving. Does any of this matter as much as the desperate housing situation? Is wildlife really as important as new estates? Is it not time rural England accepted that cities can't accommodate all the new houses and flats? Would Bowland not in fact benefit from development? Am I trying to promote tourism and leisure – arguably luxuries for only some members of society – and ignoring the needs of millions of people? The honest answers to all these questions is clear to anyone who lives in places like the Forest of Bowland. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted nations on earth. How often do we hear now the distressing news that butterflies are disappearing, that once familiar birds have become near-extinct, that hedgehogs are on the same path already taken by red squirrels? Even my greenish patch within the greater Bowland area is, frankly, a classic farm-ageddon of dry-stone wall-to-wall sheep fields, with very limited birdlife and a worrying lack of insect life. The flora that lies outside the sheep-mowed areas is not particularly diverse. The trees are, as often as not, plantations of conifers. This is precisely why we need to protect, at all costs, those areas where species thrive or, at least, have a chance to revive. Bowland is the last place to reimagine how England should reside in the coming decades. As well as being an important, if imperfect, space for nature – as outlined above – it has risible road connections, no railways passing through it, and only a couple of bus services that run infrequently and never after dark. The whole area is poorly supplied with the essential, basic amenities communities need to thrive, from schools and hospitals to theatres and cinemas to local shops and places to eat and drink. Dropping blocks of beige housing – this area seems to specialise in hideous and overpriced executive homes – would at best attract some retirees. Alternatively, if truly affordable housing were built in any useful quantities, the Government would have to seriously consider a new town project of some kind. The nearest urban areas – Preston, Blackburn, Lancaster – currently have deep-set housing, social and transport problems of their own. They all take forever to reach on the winding country lanes that link, eventually, to the jammed and dangerous A59 – the one major trunk road that tears through the Ribble Valley in a blaze of boy-racers, trundling tractors and pelotons of unhappy cyclists. Try this experiment in any of the 5,000-plus precious areas and the results will be the same. The tourism and leisure, exercise and inspiration that ordinary people get from being close to birdsong and surrounded by unsullied, unpeopled emptiness will be sacrificed to cover up the deep tragedy of 40 years (and counting) or poor planning by all shades of government, national and local. Much of British wildlife is threatened. Nightingales, badgers, dormice, otters, butterflies, dragonflies, kingfishers, tufted ducks and egrets are just some of the beautiful creatures that the extant, already damaged natural areas help to conserve. If we wipe these out, and destroy the places they inhabit, what is there for people to do, to see, to admire? The wealthy will go overseas, adding air miles. The rest of us will have nowhere to stretch our legs or lungs. Bowland is no paradise, no idyll. But Labour's short-sighted and unscientific scheme to fill the hills and vales with houses, in the face of criticism from experts from many camps, will turn it into a disaster zone.
Telegraph
22 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The countries that could solve Britain's health crisis, according to a professor
When Devi Sridhar was a child, her father, an oncologist, would show her pictures of cancer patients' blackened hearts, livers and lungs as a warning not to smoke. The slides, projected on the walls of her family home in Miami, were enough to put Sridhar and her four siblings off the habit for good. But their father was diagnosed with lymphoma when Sridhar was 12 years old, despite living a healthy life. She got used to a 'crossroads' of good or bad news at every blood test or screening. When he died, at just 49, Sridhar didn't eat for months. Sridhar left school early, graduated from the University of Miami with a medical degree at 18, and went on to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford for a PhD in anthropology. She became Prof Sridhar in 2014, when she joined the University of Edinburgh and set up its global health governance programme. Prof Sridhar was one of the first experts to warn that Covid was coming to Britain – in January 2020 – and later advised the Scottish government on its Covid strategy, while she went to fitness boot camps in a local park every day and qualified as a personal trainer. And then, one morning, she got a phone call as she rode the bus to work. A routine smear test had come back showing signs of high-risk HPV, and changes to her cervix. It was 'possibly cancer'. At home in Miami, Prof Sridhar would have been staring down the barrel of huge hospital fees and debt. In Britain, extensive NHS waiting lists meant that the changes to her cervix might not be treated quickly enough to prevent their development. In India, where her parents were born, and where there were no routine cervical cancer screenings, perhaps it never would have been caught 'until it was in an advanced stage,' says Prof Sridhar, two years on. There was no date given for a follow-up consultation, so Prof Sridhar phoned local clinics to ask whether there were any cancelled appointments she could attend. Two months later she secured a slot. Her abnormal cells were frozen, she was given an HPV vaccine to boost her immune response, and now she's cancer-free. It turned a fact that she had always known – that our health is always influenced more by the countries we live in than it is by our lifestyles – into a concrete reality. 'You can bubble yourself off individually,' with a good diet, exercise, air purifiers and water filters, 'but at the end of the day, you're all in it together,' Prof Sridhar says. That's the theme of her latest book, How Not to Die (Too Soon): The Lies We've Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us. From her perspective as a global health expert, trying to live for longer is less about changing our own habits and more about realising that 'if I moved to a blue zone, I would probably be doing all the same that people there already do, and I wouldn't be thinking about it,' she explains. Britain 'leads the world in reducing gun violence' and in bringing down smoking rates, but there remains much that we could learn from how things are done elsewhere in the world, says Prof Sridhar. Here is what she knows. Exercising like the Dutch The Netherlands is famous for the bike networks that span its cities. It would be easy to think that the Dutch love to cycle as a part of their culture, but bike lanes originally came about in the 1970s. In 1971, a Dutch girl called Simone Langenhoff was killed as she cycled to school, one of 450 children who died in road traffic accidents that year alone. Her father led a campaign to widen access to safe cycle routes. Now, there are 22,000 miles of cycle paths across the country, and by 2015, a quarter of all trips in the country were made by bike. As a result, getting exercise while you travel to work or to see friends is the default. Almost all Dutch people cycle, and 'only 4 per cent of people don't get the recommended daily amount of exercise,' says Prof Sridhar. This makes it the most fit country in the world, in terms of the amount of exercise people get per week on average. We pale in comparison here in Britain, where one in three men and 40 per cent of women are physically inactive. We have cycle lanes in our cities too, but making people want to use them is another issue. 'If you make walking or cycling safe, people will generally choose it, but people don't feel safe if they're too close to vehicles,' says Prof Sridhar. 'For women, it's often about whether a road is well-lit. We need to think through the barriers and how to tackle them, instead of telling people that their concerns aren't valid.' Prof Sridhar points to Paris as a city where Dutch-style changes are well underway. 'When they created physically separate lanes for cycling, not just a little painted path, the number of women cycling went up radically,' she says. Prof Sridhar would like to see the same in Britain, but first we need an attitude shift, she says. All of us around the world are inherently lazy – if we don't have to exercise, then we often won't. She wishes that the messaging from the government was that 'something is better than nothing,' she says. 'Even as a personal trainer, I struggle to get to the gym for an hour some days, but if I can manage a twenty minute walk, I'll do it, because that's much better than nothing at all.' Eating like the Japanese British adults get more than half of their daily calorie intake each day from ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a situation that has been tied to increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer. 'But Britain isn't fatter than people in countries like Japan because we're more stupid, or because we're lazy, or because we don't buy enough diet books,' says Prof Sridhar. It's all about the availability of healthy food – and the habits we learn as we grow up. Prof Sridhar has adapted her own diet to be more similar to what people traditionally eat in Okinawa, a subtropical region of Japan where people are twice as likely to live to 100 as they are in the rest of the country. 'The main carb in the Okinawan diet is sweet potato,' Prof Sridhar says, which is packed with fibre and micronutrients. Then there's the practice of 'only eating until you're 80 per cent full,' as opposed to the culture of 'finishing everything on your plate' that Prof Sridhar (and most of us) grew up with. But even if all of us in Britain knew about its benefits, that wouldn't be enough to keep us healthy. 'If I had a magic wand and could do one thing, it would be to change school meals in Britain, so that at least all kids are getting one really great nutritious meal a day,' Prof Sridhar says. Adolescents in Britain get closer to two thirds of their calorie intake from UPFs, as they're cheaper to mass produce and serve. It's a situation that sets us up to eat badly for life – and shows us how obesity is a nationwide problem, not the fault of individual people. 'We know that eating fruits and vegetables with healthier proteins is more expensive, so there are arguments against subsidising them to be cheaper or changing school meals. But you'll pay either way,' says Prof Sridhar. 'If someone gets Type 2 diabetes at age 19, they'll need support from the NHS for the rest of their life. In the end, they're the same budgets, because it's all taxpayer-funded and supported.' Creating a healthcare system like the Finnish In Britain, life expectancy has been in decline since 2011. In Finland, however, life expectancy has risen by around two years since then for both sexes, and things are only set to get better: by 2070, the average Finnish man should expect to live to 89. Mortality from treatable conditions is lower than the EU average, too. This is a sure sign that Finland has got it right when it comes to healthcare, Prof Sridhar says, as is the fact that cancer survival rates are among the best in Europe. 'When you're diagnosed with cancer, the faster you get access to treatment, the more likely you are to survive. Part of the reason Britain struggles with this is that we can't get treatment within the 60 days, or 30 days, whatever the crucial window is for the particular cancer that you have,' she explains. The big difference is that Finland's health system is built around prevention, says Prof Sridhar. 'With the NHS, we often wait for someone to have a heart attack before we wonder how to save them. Instead, we should look at whether that person knew they were at risk of heart attack. Did they know their blood pressure? Did they know their adiposity levels around their abdomen? It would help if we shifted our thinking and implemented screenings earlier on.' The way to do that is through tax, Prof Sridhar says. 'In Finland, they've done very well to reduce inequality. Capitalism exists, and it's accepted that some people will have nicer lives than others, but there comes a point where you're deemed to have enough. In Britain, there are billionaires and multi-millionaires that pay less tax than an NHS nurse, because of how the system works. We could tax those people properly, and have a healthier society where everyone does better, without putting the onus on normal working people.' Cleaning up our water and air like the Swiss Zurich, in Switzerland, is the least polluted city in the world. It wasn't always that way. In 2010, the city's air was badly polluted, a result of traffic as well as wood-burning for heat in the winter. The city committed to lowering its emissions, which meant reducing the amount of journeys people took by car. Here, as in many countries with cleaner air, 'the message has been about connecting diesel and the danger from air pollution to your health and the health of your loved ones, rather than the environment,' says Prof Sridhar. 'Changing your car is really expensive. Helping people to realise that children who breathe polluted air are more likely to have asthma, and will have changes in their brain, makes it easier for them to take action.' Switzerland also has some of the cleanest tap water in the world, along with Germany. In England, we've 'become worse at separating sewage from the water supply,' says Prof Sridhar. When it comes to fixing that, however, we needn't look so far for answers. 'Scotland has some of the cleanest and best-tasting water in the world, while in England, water quality has declined,' says Prof Sridhar. 'The difference is that in Scotland, our water is publicly owned. When things go wrong, we're able to hold water companies accountable, because the shareholders are people who live here. In England, where water is private and the companies are owned by people overseas, that's much harder to do.' Ageing well like India Prof Sridhar's Nani, her maternal grandmother, lives in Chennai, a big city in the east of India. At 92, she stays active, eats a simple plant-based diet, and has a good social life. She lives independently and can still get about well. 'She hasn't fought ageing, or tried to look younger,' Prof Sridhar says. Prof Sridhar's grandmother has inspired her to pursue 'functional health' rather than attempting to look a certain way. Doing squats and staying flexible is important 'because one day, those are the things that will help you to go to the bathroom on your own,' she says. 'My grandmother would never in a million years say that she's sporty, and it would be helpful to move away from those categories in Britain too,' says Prof Sridhar. It's another change that could start in schools, where at the moment, 'people can feel that they're un-sporty, so can't participate'. India has its own challenges with getting its population to move more – 'people have often had to work hard and move all of their lives just to get food and water, so why would they move in their leisure time?', Prof Sridhar points out – 'but there are fewer care homes in India as well as in Japan, so someone like my grandmother is able to stay living independently for longer, because you can stay in your community for longer'.
Sky News
37 minutes ago
- Sky News
How risky is Rachel Reeves's winter fuel U-turn?
👉Listen to Politics at Sam and Anne's on your podcast app👈 Sky News's Sam Coates and Politico's Anne McElvoy serve up their essential guide to the day in British politics. More details of Chancellor Rachel Reeves's spending squeeze next week are trickling out - including a U-turn on the winter fuel allowance, which we now know is happening in the spending review. The political implications of the U-turn, rather than the broader spending review itself, threaten to dominate the political narrative for the next week and more. How much pressure will that pile on Sir Keir Starmer and his chancellor?
