UK must ‘actively prepare' for a war on home soil, major government review warns
The UK must prepare for the possibility of a ' wartime scenario' on home soil, a major new government review has warned.
The National Security Strategy, published on Tuesday, has issued the grim warning as events in the Middle East and Russia's war with Ukraine continue to add to international instability.
It comes just 48 hours after Iran threatened to target UK bases following the US attack on its nuclear facilities before a ceasefire was announced last night.
The strategy also recommends that UK citizens undergo 'national resilience exercises' in preparation for attacks at home.
Sir Keir has announced that he intends to commit the UK to 5 per cent of GDP spending on defence and national security.
The document states: "For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario."
It adds: "The years ahead will test the United Kingdom... The direction it takes – and the decisions we take – will reverberate through the decades.
"We will need agility and courage to succeed, but we should be optimistic. We remain a resolute country, rich in history, values and in our capabilities. But most of all, there is the determination of the British people themselves. After all, we do not need to look too far into our history for an example of a whole-of-society effort, motivated by a collective will to keep each other safe.
"We can mobilise that spirit again and use it both for our national security and there building of our country."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
15 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Mark Carney is trapped under Donald Trump's Golden Dome
Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, won over a gullible electorate in April by promising to defend Canada's independence from Donald Trump. He pledged to increase defence spending and boost domestic manufacturing, and bluntly told the US president that Canada was 'not for sale' at a meeting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for Carney, the rhetoric was easier than the reality. Consider the case of the Golden Dome. Trump signed a large number of executive orders when he returned to the White House in January, including the announcement of an 'Iron Dome for America'. Inspired by Ronald Reagan's unrealised plan to build a defence system against nuclear weapons, it would help protect the US from the 'threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks'. Fittingly, given Trump's penchant for gold, the president's Iron Dome was effectively renamed the Golden Dome in May (perhaps also to distinguish it from Israel's Iron Dome air defence system). The estimated cost has been put at $175 billion (£147 billion), with a down-payment of $25 billion (£18.2 billion) included in a Republican reconciliation spending bill. The project will be headed up by General Michael Guetlein, with the US Space Force, and will apparently take three years to construct. Some are sceptical that the Golden Dome can be built on time and on budget. The congressional budget office has suggested the real costs for constructing constellations of space-based interceptors could be in the range of $161 billion (£117 billion) to $542 billion (£395 billion) over 20 years. Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican Senator, predicted the final price tag could reach 'trillions of dollars'.
The Independent
25 minutes ago
- The Independent
The 3 lingering questions Trump and Hegseth must answer about their Iran nuke strikes ‘success'
Donald Trump hailed the recent U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities as a 'spectacular military success,' claiming the bombings he ordered left the sites 'completely and totally obliterated.' But almost a week on from Operation Midnight Hammer, serious doubts remain about whether the mission actually achieved its aims. At issue is whether the attack set back Iran's ability to build a bomb by months or years, and if the strikes may have made it more difficult to track the country's progress towards that goal than before. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a press conference on Thursday in which he admonished the media for continuing to ask questions about the impact of the strikes on Iran's nuclear program. "Because of decisive military action, President Trump created the conditions to end the war, decimating – choose your word – obliterating, destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities,' he said. Here are the three key questions that remain unanswered about the strikes. What happened to Iran's highly enriched uranium? One of the primary justifications for the U.S. to strike Iran was that it had built up a stockpile of some 400 kilograms of uranium that was enriched to a record level of 60 percent, not far from the 90 percent required to make a nuclear weapon. Iran has long insisted its nuclear program is peaceful. But Israel and the U.S. concluded it was now close enough to a bomb to warrant immediate military action. The facility at Fordow had centrifuges — the highly technical machines that enrich uranium — capable of enriching that uranium to the 90 percent purity level, which is why it was targeted by the 30,000 pound bunker buster bombs in the U.S. attack. But the Trump administration doesn't appear to be able to account for Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium. When asked by a reporter on Thursday if it was possible that Iran would have moved its stockpile from Fordow or other sites ahead of the bombing, Pete Hegseth said he was "not aware of any intelligence that I've reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be … moved or otherwise," suggesting it would have been destroyed in the strikes. But European intelligence agencies are telling a different story. Preliminary assessments provided to European governments suggest that Iran moved its stockpile away from its nuclear facilities before the strikes, leaving it largely intact, according to a report in the Financial Times. That matches what Iranian officials have claimed, and what Vice President JD Vance acknowledged in the days after the attack when he said: 'We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that's one of the things that we're going to have conversations with the Iranians about.' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Wednesday that his agency does 'not have information of the whereabouts of this material." Experts have pointed out that the Trump administration has been unable to answer questions about what happened to the uranium. Nor have Trump officials discussed in detail other facilities that may have the capability to enrich that uranium further, potentially paving the way for Iran to build a bomb in secret. "They can't tell you what happened to the highly enriched uranium, and they have tried a million excuses. They can't, or won't engage with any of the questions about the facilities or what happened to the equipment,' Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute, told The Independent after watching Hegseth's press conference Thursday. Does Iran still have the ability to enrich the uranium it has? Fordow was not the only nuclear site targeted in the U.S. strikes, even if it attracted the most attention due to the size of the bombs required to hit the underground facility. Grossi, the IAEA director, has warned for months that the agency does not know where all of Iran's centrifuges are. It has not had access to those aspects of the nuclear program since February of 2021. Eric Brewer, a former U.S. intelligence official from the Nuclear Threat Initiative nonprofit, told NBC News that Iran 'still has a stockpile of advanced centrifuges that have been built up over the past few years that the IAEA didn't have access to during that time.' Other experts believe Iran may have thousands of uranium-enriching centrifuges that were never installed in the facilities that were hit by U.S. strikes. If some of those centrifuges are still intact, it is not inconceivable that they could be used or adapted to further enrich Iran's stockpile of uranium to weapons-grade level. Now, however, they will be harder to track. Have the strikes made Iran more likely to pursue a bomb in secret? There have only ever been two ways to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon: diplomacy or military action. Barack Obama, when he was president, was able to strike a deal with Iran and world powers in 2015 that dismantled much of its nuclear program, placed limits on how much uranium it could enrich, and opened its facilities to inspections. That diplomatic effort led to a massive reduction in uranium enrichment and the ability to monitor Iran's nuclear facilities. Trump tore up that deal in 2018, insisting that he could strike a better one, which spurred Iran to kickstart its enrichment into high gear, build its stockpile to record levels, and remove monitoring equipment from nuclear facilities. His decision to launch military strikes may damage Iran's ability to enrich in the short term, but it will also limit the ability to monitor and track its activities. Not only that, it has likely significantly increased the political will inside Iran to build a nuclear weapon — something U.S intelligence agencies have consistently said that Iran's leadership had not yet chosen to do. All of that raises the risk that hardliners in Iran will decide that building a nuclear weapon in secret is essential for the country's defense. 'Iran has responded to attacks against this facility in the past by burying, hardening and dispersing its nuclear sites,' Kelsey Davenport, the Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association, where she focuses on the nuclear and missile programs in Iran, told The Independent earlier this week. 'If Iran is focused on preserving its leverage and its option to weaponize over the long term, then it can build new, more fortified facilities, and it can disperse those facilities. And the international community is blind right now because inspectors are not in Iran's facilities,' she said. 'So if these strikes were aimed at preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, they have failed spectacularly. They have likely driven Iran closer to a nuclear weapon, while degrading confidence and credibility in U.S. diplomacy as a viable off-ramp to resolve this crisis,' she added. The Trump administration has offered no clear plan to track or prevent Iran from secretly building a bomb. With diplomacy now likely to be more difficult than before, the U.S. faces the prospect of further military entanglement — and a potential long-term quagmire.
Telegraph
32 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump wins tax breaks for US with threat of ‘revenge' raid on foreign business
Donald Trump has extracted tax breaks for US companies after threatening to impose a 'revenge' levy on foreign businesses that moved money out of the US. G7 countries are to abandon plans to make US companies pay a minimum level of corporation tax in return for Mr Trump dropping the threat of 'revenge tax'. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, said that he has asked both houses of the US Congress to remove a Trump's tax proposal, known as Section 899, from the budget bill after an agreement with the other G7 countries. Section 899 is part of Mr Trump's 'big, beautiful' tax and spend bill, and would have enabled the US president to retaliate against countries that harm American interests with 'discriminatory' tax policies by taxing any money taken out of the country. The power threatened to be hugely costly to British businesses. Some of Britain's biggest companies, including AstraZeneca, BAE and Barclays, have significant operations in the US that could be at risk of being targeted. Fears had mounted that the powers could be used on the UK as a way of forcing Sir Keir Starmer to water down or abolish Britain's digital service tax, which applies to US tech giants. On Thursday night, Mr Bessent wrote on X: 'After months of productive dialogue with other countries on the OECD Global Tax Deal, we will announce a joint understanding among G7 countries that defends American interests. 'President Trump paved the way for this historic achievement. On January 20, the President issued two executive orders instructing [the US] Treasury to defend US tax sovereignty, and as a result of President Trump's leadership we now have a great deal for the American people.' Mr Bessent said the G7 had agreed not to impose what is known as OECD Pillar 2 on US companies. That refers to a 15pc minimum corporate tax rate, which was agreed in principle by 140 countries to be imposed on companies with global revenues of more than €750m (£639m). The idea was to stop multinationals shunting profits from one country to another to take advantage of lower tax rates. Economists complained that it would be only a matter of time before the minimum rate was hiked, locking countries into ever-higher taxes, globally enforced. Joe Biden was an enthusiastic backer of a global minimum rate of corporation tax. Mr Bessent said: 'By reversing the Biden administration's unwise commitments, we are now protecting our nation's authority to enact tax policies that serve the interests of American businesses and workers.' Mr Trump had claimed that the tax deal 'not only allows extraterritorial jurisdiction over American income but also limits our nation's ability to enact tax policies that serve the interests of American businesses and workers'.
