Latest news with #strategicreview
Zawya
2 days ago
- Business
- Zawya
Spar Group plans to sell Swiss and UK retail businesses
Spar Group plans to sell its retail businesses in Switzerland and in the United Kingdom after completing a strategic review of its European operations, the retail and wholesale group said. The group, which owns several Spar country licences of the Dutch Spar group, has been trimming its international operations in order to "maximise the return on capital allocated". Last year it sold its loss-making Polish business. The group said it was in exclusive talks with an established UK-based business over the sale of its UK operation Appleby Westward Group. The potential buyer, which Spar did not name, was "well positioned to develop and grow AWG in South West England," it said. In Switzerland, Spar has been engaging established parties with extensive business interests in the region and experience in European food retail and distribution, it added. "The group approach has been to engage parties whose interests align with the growth ambitions of the local management teams and retailer partners, and will ensure continuity for employees, suppliers and customers," Spar said. The Swiss business, with 300 stores, contributes R16bn to group turnover, while the South West England unit contributes R6bn. Internationally, Spar will be left with Ireland, its biggest overseas business, and a joint venture in Sri Lanka. All rights reserved. © 2022. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Times
Labour's breezy slogans won't buy peace
It begins, as these set-piece unveilings always do, with a CGI carrier task force skimming across a PowerPoint ocean. Labour's gleaming strategic defence review pledges to make Britain 'ten times more lethal' — breezy sloganeering from a team that's spent twelve months turning bullets into bullet points, while the world's villains got on with firing the real thing. Sir Keir talks of 'war-fighting readiness'; the Treasury mutters, sotto voce: 'but not just yet, old chap'. Forgive us if we recognise the choreography. This review hasn't moved the dial: it's spun it in a full circle. Between us, we dragged our defence spending commitment to 2.5 per cent of GDP, only to watch Labour shelve the pledge, vanish into a year-long policy huddle, then re-emerge clutching a slightly dog-eared version of the plan we'd already put in motion. What's been dressed up as bold reform is, in truth, delay repackaged as discovery. The £6 billion complex weapons deal with MBDA? Already signed. The £1.5 billion for BAE munitions? Already funded. Advanced targeting and data networks? Green-lit. A dozen Aukus submarines? Part of the 28 ships and boats announced by us in the last parliament. But it's not just the reheated announcements — it's the structural fragility of what's now been offered. Defence reviews, like soufflés, tend to collapse without heat. They may launch fully funded, but are soon gnawed to bits by cost pressures. If this review meant business, the chancellor would have stamped '3% by 2030' — three by thirty — on the front page in block capitals. Instead, we're handed a blueprint that's hollow before it even hits the slipway. If the goal was to send a message to Moscow, it should have been written in Sheffield steel and Devonport apprenticeships, not in a carousel of retweeted infographics. And while ministers claim fiscal prudence, they're preparing to spend billions handing back the Chagos Islands — a territorial carve-up that will warm every autocrat's heart. Worse, if that bill comes out of the defence budget, then they're quite literally cutting weapons to fund weakness. Meanwhile, the world has changed gear. We've moved from postwar to prewar. Hypersonic missiles compress decision time to seconds. Quantum cyberattacks skip past timetables and Whitehall excuses. A government that waits for 'economic headroom' before making hard choices may find that deterrence isn't a direct debit you can pause. Either you pay up front, or you pay in blood. This week could, and should, have been different. Commit to three by thirty. Publish an equipment plan that sustains the drumbeat of conventional munitions. Double down on sovereign capacity while building out allied platforms from Aukus to GCAP. And recognise the truth every chancellor since Gladstone should have known: that deterrence is cheaper than war. Britain remains a nuclear-armed, cybercapable, globally deployed power. Our armed forces will do their duty. The question is whether His Majesty's Treasury will do theirs. Because in the end, it's simple: invest now and buy peace, or fumble down the back of the sofa when the storm has already broken. And until that choice is made — properly, publicly, and with conviction — the only thing 'ten times more lethal' in this review is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
The cost of deterring Russian aggression is high – but the cost of war is higher still
Most strategic defence reviews – this is the ninth since the end of the Cold War in 1990 – have two major 'strategic' flaws. The first is that the world changes so fast that they are outdated almost before they are presented to the nation. Not much, to be fair, can be done about that. The second, a more puzzling and abiding failure, is that they rarely give much attention to the essential question predicating any such exercise – what, exactly, are Britain's armed forces (and the Secret Intelligence Service) going to be asked to do in the coming years? This is at least as important a consideration as the problem of getting defence spending up to a certain target by a certain date. If a government chooses the wrong priorities and buys the wrong kit under a set of faulty assumptions, then it doesn't really matter whether the Ministry of Defence determines that (for example) 2.6 or 2.7 per cent of GDP should be devoted to armaments – especially as GDP can be difficult to predict, and the definition of defence expenditure can be elasticated to include, for instance, service pensions. Indeed, a more sensible approach might be to set a cash target for spending, irrespective of how the economy performs. After all, if Donald Trump is at liberty to ramp up the required percentage target – and he's suggested 5 per cent as the figure – then virtually no European nation will realistically be able to achieve it. (Besides, Vladimir Putin doesn't pay much heed to such statistics, and is more interested in how many drones an enemy possesses.) Unfortunately, the latest defence review suffers from some of the traditional weaknesses. Just as every such document has done since the Atlantic Alliance was founded by treaty in 1949, it suggests that Nato is central to the UK's defence. In the words of Sir Keir Starmer: 'The Nato alliance means something profound: that we will never fight alone. It is a fundamental source of our strategic strength. That's why our defence policy will always be 'Nato first.' Something that is written through this review.' But is that even any longer true? Surely not. For diplomatic reasons, Sir Keir might not feel free to say it, but the Trump administration has made it perfectly apparent that America's support for Nato is no longer a given. Senior colleagues of the US president, with his evident blessing, informed a gobsmacked European audience at the last Munich Security Conference that America is downgrading its commitment to the security of Europe. Vice-president Vance even went so far as to argue that it is not Russia, under President Putin, that represents the greatest danger to the freedoms of Europeans: it is the progressive 'threat from within'. Perhaps the US intelligence services no longer tell Mr Vance what's going on inside Russia or occupied Ukraine with regard to religious worship and free speech. At any rate, under Mr Trump, America's relationship with Nato is more transactional, and its support cannot be counted on if that would get in the way of the rapprochement with Russia, as its abandonment of Ukraine shamefully proves. Indeed, in this context, it is reasonable to wonder if our collaborative ties with the US on intelligence and the nuclear deterrent – the foundations of the special relationship – can also be guaranteed on their current basis. The clue that this may not be taken as read can be seen in the proposal that Britain acquire aircraft capable of delivering nuclear warheads, rather than relying entirely on the US-controlled Trident missile delivery systems. The prime minister can't say or do anything that might worsen Mr Trump's attitude to America's allies; Sir Keir is right to do everything possible to preserve that vital special security and defence relationship. Equally, though, he would be negligent if he did not contemplate the prospect of the transatlantic bond one day becoming looser. Hence the tilt towards Europe, the formation of the Coalition of the Willing over Ukraine, and the proposed UK-EU defence pact that has emerged from the Brexit 'reset'. But if there is to be a new relationship with Europe, including participation in the European Defence Agency, how does that affect the planned expansion of the British defence industry? Nor are Britain's wider foreign and defence policy priorities any more a decision uniquely for London. The 'global Britain' role envisaged by the last Conservative government suddenly feels out of date. When asked by reporters about the Aukus (Australia-UK-US) defence pact, President Trump professed to be unaware of it. More forcefully, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has told European powers that the Indo-Pacific region is America's to protect – and that they should stick to defending their own continent. Where that leaves the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers is an expensive question that remains moot. Will Britain join in the defence of Taiwan, and if so, now? Matters such as the security of the Falklands and other vestigial British obligations have also largely escaped the nation's attention for decades. The legal basis for the Diego Garcia base has been established, at a price, but is it overwhelmingly an American, rather than a British, strategic asset? The other great defence challenge for ministers is in persuading the British public that the threats that are more or less clearly defined in the defence review are real. To many, they feel distant. Here, the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage seem to agree that, however barbaric his actions in Eastern Europe, Putin is not going to occupy the UK. The idea that the Russians, still less the Chinese, are about to invade Kent seems absurd. Yet the cyberattacks, the poisonings on British soil, political interference via social media, and the sabotage of communications cables are all very obvious assaults. The attack on the NHS a few years ago, which left staff resorting to paper and pen, should serve as a warning of Russia's malign intent. Sir Keir and his colleagues should be remaking the historic argument that it is not in the British national interest for the continent of Europe to be dominated by a hostile power. That is why Britain fought the Napoleonic wars, two world wars and the Cold War. The cost of deterring Russian aggression, whatever it ends up being as a proportion of national income, will be high – but, as Ukraine also proves, the cost of fighting a war is incalculably higher.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on UK military strategy: prepare for a US retreat – or be left gravely exposed
With the prime minister's Churchillian claims that 'the front line is here', the public might expect a military posture that meets the drama of the moment. Yet the promised rise in defence spending – from 2.3% to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027 – suggests something less than full-scale mobilisation. The strategic defence review is systematic and detailed, but it remains an exercise in tightly bounded ambition. It speaks of daily cyber-attacks and undersea sabotage, but proposes no systemic institutional overhaul or acute surge in resilience. Given the developing dangers, it is surprising not to spell out a robust home-front framework. Instead, it is a cautious budget hike in the costume of crisis – signalling emergency while deferring real commitment for military financing. The review suggests that the more ambitious spending target of 3% of GDP, still shy of Nato's 3.5% goal, is delayed to the next parliament. The plan is not to revive Keynesianism in fatigues. It is a post-austerity military modernisation that is technocratic and geopolitically anxious. It borrows the urgency of the past without inheriting its economic boldness. The review marks a real shift: it warns of 'multiple, direct threats' for the first time since the cold war and vows to reverse the 'hollowing out' of Britain's armed forces. But in an age of climate emergencies and democratic drift, UK leadership should rest on multilateralism, not pure militarism. Declaring Russian 'nuclear coercion' the central challenge, and that the 'future of strategic arms control … does not look promising', while sinking £15bn into warheads, risks fuelling escalation instead of pursuing arms control. Given the war in Ukraine, there is an ominous warning about changing US 'security priorities'. This calls into question the wisdom of being overly reliant on America, which is now internally unstable and dismantling global public goods – such as the atmospheric data that drones rely on for navigation. Left unsaid but clearly underlying the report is the idea that the old defence model is no longer sufficient – for example, when maritime adversaries can weaponise infrastructure by sabotaging undersea cables, or where critical data systems are in commercial hands. It cannot be right that Ukraine's sovereignty depends on the goodwill of the world's richest man. But the private satellite network Starlink keeps Ukrainian hospitals, bases and drones online, leaving Kyiv hostage to the whims of its volatile owner, Elon Musk. The menace of hybrid warfare – including disinformation, cyber-attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces – intensified in the last decade. This should see Britain forge deeper institutional ties with European partners, not just military but in infrastructure and information technologies. This would allow for a sovereign digital strategy for European nations to free them from dependency on mercurial actors. Though the review gestures toward greater societal involvement, it stops short of articulating a whole-of-society doctrine like Norway's. This, when some analysts say the third world war has already begun with a slow, global breakdown of the post-1945 institutional order. The defence review should be about more than missiles and missions. It must also be about whether the country can keep the lights on, the gas flowing, the internet up and the truth intact. This review sees the threats, but not yet the system needed to confront them. In that gap lies the peril.
Sky News
3 days ago
- General
- Sky News
Defence review: 'War ready' - but for what war?
👉 Listen to Sky News Daily on your podcast app 👈 The prime minister has launched a 10-year Strategic Defence Review setting out how Britain will operate in an ever-more worrying geopolitical environment. Sir Keir Starmer said "every citizen has a role to play" in "defence of the realm", but do we know what kind of war we're preparing for? On today's Sky News Daily, Niall Paterson is joined by Sky's defence editor Deborah Haynes and military analyst Michael Clarke to discuss whether the defence review meets the mark.
