'UK's new defence plan could be biggest change in 150 years - if it happens'
Take the army numbers for instance. Many hoped these would be boosted from less than 73,000 as they currently stand. This is by no means intentional even though numbers were brutally cut over years of Tory rule. It is a result of poor recruitment and retention. There is only the possibility of a 'small uplift.'
It says: 'Overall we envisage an increase in the total of Regular personnel when finding allows. This includes a small uplift in Army Regulars as a priority.'
But there is mention of 'increasing the number of Active Reserves by 20% - when funding allows - most likely in the 2030s…' There is no promise to increase troop numbers and it merely means they might be increased if we can afford it if and when the need arises.
The SDR - the most important one in decades - comes at a time of soaring hostility with Russia, whilst China, Iran and North Korea are also threats of varying degrees. And it promises a great deal whilst the big question is whether it will deliver too.
One of the biggest problems for the UK in time of war would be air defences, how to shoot down incoming missiles. Currently, if it were large and fast incoming missiles this might be undertaken by one the UK's Type 45 destroyers, as a sea to air defence or F35B or Typhoon fighter jets as in air-to-air.
Or the Army maye use Sky Sabre, a lorry mounted air defence system which replaced Rapier. That system fires anti-air missiles.
In his introduction defence secretary John Healey clearly says: 'We will protect the UK homeland with up to £1bn new funding invested in homeland air and missile defence and creating a new CyberEM Command to defend Britain from daily attacks in the grey zone.'
But it turns out this is not a shiny new air defence system such as Israel had , like the Iron Dome or David's Sling. It is merely a continuation of the Type 45 - fighter jet defences, just with better communication and integration.
Like many reviews, the lack of granularity could make you suspect there's not much in it. The emphasis on AI, the risk of space wars, combating the threat from cyber assaults is all there and alarming and reassuring at the same time.
It is reassuring the weapons production is being stepped up with six new missiles factories being created, boosting jobs and UK defences. But we don't know what they are, if they are new or what will fire them.
The very fact this review happened is good and shows the government is getting things done on defence.
But there will be huge trade-offs, perhaps with manning moving aside for new high-tech weaponry. Cost is going to be a huge issue and it remains to be seen if all of this can be afforded.
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The Guardian
40 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Conservatives not close to recognising ‘how badly placed they are', says Gauke
The Conservatives are 'not close to recognising' how badly they are positioned for the next election, the former cabinet minister David Gauke has said. Gauke, a former justice secretary who also worked in the Treasury under George Osborne, said many in the party were not willing to fully repudiate Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. The party was ignoring heartland voters in the home counties who had turned in droves to the Liberal Democrats and was spending too much time fighting on Reform UK's turf, he added. 'If the next election is going to be about immigration and the war on the woke, it's not going to be the Conservative party that are the beneficiaries of that. It will be Nigel Farage and Reform,' he said, in an interview with the Guardian. 'Trying to make those issues more salient is a strategic blunder. First and foremost the Conservatives need to fight the next election on the economy.' Gauke criticised his party for spending too much time on culture-war issues where Farage was the dominant voice. The former MP, who has authored a major sentencing review for Labour set to be made law this autumn, said it was not a foregone conclusion that Farage would become prime minister, but depended on Labour kickstarting economic growth. He said to do so would mean hard choices for Rachel Reeves on tax rises and the pensions triple lock, as well as seeking a much closer relationship with the EU, saying the Labour chancellor 'needs to talk to the bond markets more than she needs to talk to the parliamentary party or the British public'. He said the Tory party had not yet fully confronted why it had become so unpopular and had not undergone the transformation that Labour had after defeat at the 2019 election. 'Most of the Labour party [MPs] felt that the Jeremy Corbyn years were an aberration and that they wanted to revert to something different. They found it very easy to repudiate, whereas quite a lot of the Conservative party looks back at the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss time as being proper Conservatism,' he said. 'I don't think the Conservative party is close to recognising how badly placed they are, and all the thinking at the moment is the worry about Reform. Yes, Reform are taking Conservative votes, but a lot of that was because the Conservatives just no longer looked functional.' He said the party had no message that would resonate with the home counties. 'The aspirational, successful, educated voter, they voted Conservative for economic competence, but now looks at the Conservative party and thinks, 'you haven't really been speaking to me for a very long time, probably not since the 2015 election',' he said. Gauke, who had the Conservative whip removed by Johnson in 2019 for voting to stop a no-deal Brexit, said he believed the Labour government had to be more resilient to criticism and unpopularity – and that the Reform UK surge in the polls was not necessarily a sign Farage was on course to be PM. 'There will be a lot of tactical voting against Reform. [Farage] is evidently beatable if Labour can deliver strong economic growth. I think it would be hard for the Conservatives to win the next election, but they can re-establish themselves as the main opposition,' he said. 'But if both try to say 'Nigel Farage is right, but please don't vote for him', then I think they're in real trouble.' Instead of being surprised at the polls, Labour MPs should accept 'that being in government you are going to be unpopular', he said. 'Governments used to come back from deep levels of unpopularity on a regular basis and it can still be done. All of that has become much harder but it's still fundamentally true. But you have to have a programme and there's not been enough of it.' Gauke said he wanted Reeves to succeed in driving economic growth but that would mean tough political choices because of the high debt interest Britain was paying. 'We are on the naughty step. If we had the same gilt yields as Germany, we would be paying £50bn less in debt interest a year,' he said. The former chief secretary to the Treasury said it was 'a delusion that's very popular on the left of politics' that enough could be raised by just putting up taxes on the very wealthy. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion But he said long-term economic confidence would come only if Reeves was prepared to signal she would make hard choices, including on issues that might not immediately score with the Office of Budget Responsibility. 'It would show she is facing up to some of those challenges on the pension's triple lock, on the loss of fuel duty revenue because of moving to electric vehicles. None of these things are electorally popular, but if the markets think, 'actually this is a serious government', then you get into a virtuous circle,' he said. Keir Starmer and Reeves should also be prepared to ask for more from the EU in terms of trade ties, Gauke said. 'They made some really good progress earlier this year, there was hardly any political reaction. Be bolder. Come back to that. Businesses would love it if we were prepared to be bolder on the EU.' Gauke, who has spent time with the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she had been lord chancellor with a 'sense of direction' who was effectively driving change at the department. Mahmood is known to be seriously considering what the UK could do to reform its approach to the European convention on human rights, including whether the government could act unilaterally on how it interpreted some aspects of the convention when it came to prisons or immigration. But Gauke said he was concerned about the UK acting alone, and said it would be more effective for signatory countries to press for change as a collective. 'My sense from where Shabana is – is can it be improved? Is the interpretation of it much broader than we would want? And I think those are the right questions to be asking,' he said. 'If you try and set the dynamic up as 'us against the rest', then you're just heading for a fall, but a lot of the concerns that the UK has about the operation of the ECHR is reflected in other signatories. You're going to have to work with other countries.' He said he was deeply concerned his own party would embrace the policy of leaving the ECHR, a move favoured by the Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick. 'You just end up with a repeat of the Brexit episodes, of our international influence being diminished and our reputation damaged and a big practical issue in Northern Ireland. I don't know why the country would be attracted to that as an offer,' he said.
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
Top five lowlights from Sturgeon's memoir
They say good things come to those who wait, but Steerpike will let readers be the judge of that when it comes to Nicola Sturgeon's memoir Frankly. The 450-page account by Scotland's former first minister was supposed to be hitting bookshelves on Thursday, but some shops decided to release it ahead of time and Mr S has got his hands on an early copy, reading it so you don't have to. Here are the top lowlights from Sturgeon's new tome… Trans U-turn One of the controversies that, some suggest, prompted her resignation in 2023 was the gender reform bill – and the scandal of double rapist Isla Bryson being housed in a women's prison. The question of whether Bryson is a man or a woman proved rather difficult for the then-first minister to answer at the time – and Sturgeon still hasn't managed to square this circle, pointedly calling the rapist 'they' in an ITV interview last night. At the time, Sturgeon first voted down Tory MSP Russell Findlay's amendment to ban sex offenders from obtaining a gender recognition certificate and later voted against SNP MSP Michelle Thomson's amendment to pause applications by those charged with rape or sexual assault. While she dismissed concerns from the bill's critics then, now Sturgeon admits in her book: 'The question I ask myself most when I reflect on this period is whether I should have hit the pause button when I realised, sometime in 2022, just how polarised the issue was becoming. With hindsight I wish I had.' Too little, too late… Salmond fallout Sturgeon's infamous fallout with her political mentor and boss Alex Salmond has had books written about it – and so of course the ex-FM had to include at least a nod to it in her own. But she hasn't held back. She broke down in tears when her colleague Ian Blackford told her Salmond had passed away in October 2024 and confessed she wondered whether she should cut the chapter on him from her book. 'Would I just be stirring up pain for his wife and family (which I truly don't want to do)?' she pondered. Regardless, she went and published it anyway. Charming! Sturgeon claimed that the former SNP leader hadn't read the independence white paper, accused him of undermining John Swinney during the latter's first attempt at leading the SNP and alleged he had planted questions via opposition MSPs on the committee assessing the Scottish government's handling of harassment complaints. In short, despite her claims of grief on hearing of her former boss's passing, the SNP's Dear Leader decided to pull no punches. 'I have tried not to rewrite history,' she begins the chapter, later adding: '[Alex] was trying to rewrite history.' Talk about tit for tat! Cross-party politics Scotland's former FM has long been accused of creating a divisive political culture over both independence and the trans debate. Yet in her memoir she claims that her motivation for a deal with the Scottish Greens after falling short of a majority in the 2021 Holyrood election was down to her desire to 'champion a more constructive style of politics'. Er, right. She goes on: At the tail end of the last parliament, embroiled in the Salmond saga and worn down by Covid, I had become weary of the opportunism and perpetual game-playing of opposition parties. It was partly a result of electoral frustration, but they had become impervious to any attempts to build cross-party consensus. And this is the woman lauded for her high emotional intelligence?! Brexit The Queen of the Nats wouldn't ever exploit a democratic result for her own political gain, would she? Not according to her memoir, anyway, in which she writes that, after Britain voted to leave the EU: The established narrative now, though, is that I went hell for leather for a second referendum immediately after the Brexit vote. It isn't true. On the contrary, I spent the next nine months doing the precise opposite. I tried hard to persuade the UK government to pursue a compromise option… It was in good faith, therefore, that we published 'Scotland's Place in Europe' in December 2016, mapping out what a different outcome for Scotland might look like and how it could be achieved. I was explicit that this was a solution for Scotland within the UK; in other words, an alternative to independence. It seems rather odd, then, that in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, Sturgeon told a journalist that the chance of another independence referendum was 'highly likely'. And since then, the SNP has consistently stood on a platform that advocates for closer ties with the EU – if not rejoining the European Union altogether. How very interesting… London The SNP's Dear Leader has spent most of her life calling for Scotland's independence from the United Kingdom – but in a rather amusing revelation, it doesn't seem like she wants to practice what she preaches. In her book, she writes: 'I am determined to see more of the world. I might live outside of Scotland for a period.' In fact, she has since admitted to both the Sunday Times and the BBC that: 'I love London.' Just one of those nationalists who'll do anything for their country but live in it, eh?
Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Liz Truss criticises ‘multicultural' Olympic ceremony 12 years after praising it
Liz Truss has criticised the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony as not representing 'the views of the average Briton'. The former prime minister suggested that 'the views expressed' at the event were not those shared by people outside of London but of 'an elite that hates Britain', even though she praised the ceremony in 2013. Speaking to Ben Shapiro, a Right-wing US commentator, Ms Truss claimed that the 'elite are trying to suppress' the voices of those in small towns and rural communities. Shapiro, who hosts the Ben Shapiro Show, asked the former Tory leader about the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, which took place in the capital. Former UK PM Liz Truss on what Britain must learn from Trump — The Ben Shapiro Show (@BenShapiroShow) August 11, 2025 He asked: 'Can there be a restoration of a true pride in what Great Britain was and should be in the middle of this bizarre sort of melange of multiculturalism that has taken over London?' Ms Truss replied: 'The views expressed in the Olympic ceremony are not the views of the average Briton. 'The problem is we have an elite that hates Britain, and they have done for some time, that is the history of people like Jeremy Corbyn [and] Keir Starmer. 'They want to help the human rights of anybody who doesn't live in Britain, but they're very reticent about actually defending our own interests. 'We need to galvanise the people who are patriots in our country, but they have been neglected. They generally don't live in London. They live in small towns, they live in rural areas. They don't have much of a voice. And what is happening is the elite are trying to suppress those voices.' But Ms Truss had previously praised the 2012 opening ceremony, which took place shortly before she became an education minister under Lord Cameron. In a speech in 2013, she said: 'Last summer's Olympics opening ceremony seamlessly combined Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Shakespeare, Tim Berners-Lee and Mary Poppins.' In 2019, she told The Sunday Telegraph: 'I think we need to revive what I call the Olympics 2012 spirit [with] a modern, patriotic, enterprising vision of Britain and we need to use Brexit to achieve that.' The opening ceremony of London 2012 was directed by Danny Boyle and attracted some 900 million viewers. It featured a cameo appearance of Queen Elizabeth II alongside Daniel Craig in his role as James Bond. The pair apparently jumped out of a helicopter together into the Olympic stadium, where the late monarch was wearing the same outfit as she had been when she met Bond in Buckingham Palace. The show also featured references to the novel Peter Pan, the Chariots of Fire film, and several hymns and folk songs such as Jerusalem and Danny Boy. In a segment designed to celebrate the NHS, performers danced in traditional nurse uniforms and white doctors' coats.
