Starmer says it would be ‘big mistake’ to think Ukraine no longer needs military support because peace deal inevitable
Q: What do you envisage the UK’s military support for Ukraine looking like, in the light of the changes in the US?
Starmer says he wants to ensure there is a lasting peace.
And if there is a deal – he says we don’t know if there will be one yet – then countries will have to defend it.
He says the UK will play its part.
But that “has to be done in conjunction with the United States”, he says.
He says he has two other points to make.
First, in the meantime they must put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. It would be a “big mistake” to stop that on the assumption there will be a deal.
In the meantime we need to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. We don’t know there’s going to be a deal. The fighting is going on, and it’s a big mistake to think, well, all we’ve got to do is wait for a deal.
We’ve got to make sure that if they are fighting on, they’re in the strongest position.
And he says the whole for Europe needs to step up.
He says he hopes that will increase orders for British factories in the defence sector.
Key events
At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the PM’s spokesperson confirmed that Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is writing to the Sentencing Council asking it to withdraw the guidelines saying judges should get a pre-sentence report before sentencing some categories of offender. (See 9.46am.)
Asked if the government would support the Conservative party’s proposal (see 10.08am) for legislation giving ministers the power to overrule the Sentencing Council (which they cannot do at the the moment), the spokesperson played down the prospect of this happening, without ruling it out. He replied:
The first step, as the justice secretary set out, is to to write to the Sentencing Council. We wait their response. I’m not going to get ahead of that process.
MoD announces £30m deal to buy advanced attack drones for Ukraine
The Ministry of Defence has announced that it has agreed a £30m deal to buy advanced attack drones for Ukraine.
In a news release, it says:
The new contracts, totalling nearly £30m and backed by the International Fund for Ukraine, will result in Anduril UK supplying cutting-edge Altius 600m and Altius 700m drones – known as loitering munitions – that are designed to monitor an area before striking targets that enter it.
The defence secretary [John Healey] visited Anduril yesterday, where he spoke with a number of American and British staff. Founded in California, Anduril continues to invest significantly in the UK with a large footprint across the country and plans to rapidly scale, in line with the Government’s commitment to keeping the nation safe while providing highly skilled jobs …
The work with Anduril UK been led by Defence Equipment & Support – the procurement arm of the MOD – on behalf of the UK-administered International Fund for Ukraine (IFU). The fund now stands at more than £1.3bn worth of pledges from 10 other countries, of which the UK has contributed £500m.
Ukraine’s armed forces will take delivery of the drones, launchers and spare parts over the coming months.
Healey is in Washington and he visited Anduril’s HQ in the city yesterday ahead of a meeting later today with Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary.
Starmer says Churchill and Attlee never chose between US and Europe, and he won’t make that ‘wrong choice’ either
Keir Starmer has restated his belief that the UK should not choose between an alliance with the US and an alliance with Europe.
In an interview with Sky News, he said:
What matters is lasting peace. For that to happen, it’s very important that we don’t make what I think would be a false choice, between on the one hand working with the United States, on the other hand working with Europe.
We’ve enjoyed peace for 80 years … We’ve done that by working with the US – no two countries work as closely as we do on defence and security and intelligence – but also by working with our European partners.
And that’s why I’m resisting those who are saying – Churchill didn’t make the choice, Attlee didn’t make the choice, but they’re now urging me to make the choice between the US and the Europe. Wrong choice, in my view. We’ve preserved the peace for 80 years by working with both the US and Europe, and now is not the time to break that.
Starmer may have been in thinking in particular of the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who twice in the Commons this week urged Starmer to accept that President Trump is now an unreliable ally on matters related to Russia. Starmer told Davey he did not agree.
(Davey would probably respond to Starmer’s point that Churchill and Attlee never had to deal with a US president like Trump.)
Asked to confirm that he would have preferred President Trump not to suspend military aid to Ukraine, Starmer replied:
My strong view is that we need to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. I’ve been arguing that for many, many months.
Asked why he was not at the EU meeting in Brussels today, Starmer said it was an EU meeting and the UK has left the EU. But he said he was talking to European leaders regularly and that he had a meeting of his own planned for tomorrow.
Richard Tice claims main parties ‘terrified’ of Reform UK in Scotland as he welcomes two Tory councillor defections
Libby Brooks
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.
Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, has told reporters in Glasgow this morning that Scottish voters are “sick and tired of getting poorer under the SNP” as he visited a community centre and a fish and chip shop in the city’s east end.
Tice said that an “exciting quantity of 15 to 24 year olds” was supporting the party north of the border with membership numbers now “just under 10,000”.
A week after first minister John Swinney described Reform as “fundamentally racist” as he called on opposition parties to come together to challenge the far right, Tice said this showed the SNP was “so terrified of us that they are having to throw about ridiculous insults and language”.
Tice was in Glasgow to meet two defecting Tory councillors although he struggled to remember their full names at the press call on the pavement outside the Val D’oro chippie.
Tice was pressed on what devolved policies the party would put forward for next year’s Scottish parliament elections but said this would happen “in due course”, with his emphasis currently on “cutting wasteful spending, ending “ludicrous” policies transitioning from North Sea drilling and putting more money in people’s pockets “at the end of the week”.
Although Reform consistently poll lower in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, Holyrood’s proportional system means they are currently forecast to win up to 12 MSPs, which could place them in a powerful position with a minority government.
Speaking to activists and locals at recent council byelections is seems that Reform’s lack of Scotland-specific focus is not deterring support. While the party is still building its infrastructure north of the border, dislocation from the mainstream is driving some former Tory and Labour voters to Reform despite the fact they have yet to put together a Scotland-focused offer.
Starmer is now talking to the media, but the sound has cut out on the feed I’m using. I will post his words as soon as I get them.
Starmer says it would be ‘big mistake’ to think Ukraine no longer needs military support because peace deal inevitable
Q: What do you envisage the UK’s military support for Ukraine looking like, in the light of the changes in the US?
Starmer says he wants to ensure there is a lasting peace.
And if there is a deal – he says we don’t know if there will be one yet – then countries will have to defend it.
He says the UK will play its part.
But that “has to be done in conjunction with the United States”, he says.
He says he has two other points to make.
First, in the meantime they must put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. It would be a “big mistake” to stop that on the assumption there will be a deal.
In the meantime we need to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. We don’t know there’s going to be a deal. The fighting is going on, and it’s a big mistake to think, well, all we’ve got to do is wait for a deal.
We’ve got to make sure that if they are fighting on, they’re in the strongest position.
And he says the whole for Europe needs to step up.
He says he hopes that will increase orders for British factories in the defence sector.
Starmer starts by encouraging the staff to exercise their right to ask him questions. He says he is there to serve them, and they should tell him what they think.
They don’t have to ask about defence, he says. He says they can ask about anything.
The first questioner says Cammell Laird (the plant where they are speaking) employs a lot of women. What can be done to get more women working in this sector.
Starmer encourages people to say this is a good option for women.
Q: What will the government do to support apprenticeships?
Starmer says he is a big supporter of apprenticeships. He says his dad was a toolmaker, and he learned his trade as an apprentice. He says he grew up in the world.
Starmer takes part in Q&A at defence factory
Keir Starmer is taking part at a Q&A at a defence factory. He is due to take questions from workers and from the media.
There is a live feed here.
Getting defence spending to 2.5% of GDP ‘just starting gun’ in process of strengthening military, says armed forces minister
Luke Pollard, the armed forces minister, has said that raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, the new policy announced last week, will be “just the starting gun” in the process of strengthening the armed forces.
Speaking at a conference at Chatham House, he said:
The [2.5%] amount is just the starting gun in a much bigger race to protect Britain’s security.
It is not just defence spending that has failed to keep pace with the impending threat. Defence modernisation has fallen badly behind too.
UK defence remains fundamentally shaped by the risk and the demand of the post-cold war era, where there was no direct threat to our security from a major adversary, nor an imperative to be immediately ready for war, to defend our homeland or to mobilise our defence industry.
And at a time of dizzying progress in military technology, warfare and global geopolitics, standing still meant one thing – that meant rapid obsolescence.”
2.5% is just the start of a much bigger process. The more fundamental challenge is to fully bring our armed forces into the modern era and build a leading, tech-enabled military capable of deterring, fighting and winning through constant innovation at a wartime pace.
Officials from around 20 countries met yesterday to discuss how a “coalition of the willing” could support Ukraine, it has emerged.
The meeting was convened by the UK. The countries taking part were mostly European and Commonwealth, and it is being described as a “planning meeting”.
A Whitehall source familiar with what happened said this showed “the desire of a number of different countries to play their part”. Some of the countries at yesterday’s meeting were not at the one at the weekend.
On Sunday Keir Starmer convened a meeting of mostly European leaders in London where they discussed how a “coalition of the willing” could provide security for Ukraine in the event of a peace deal.
Reducing eligibility should not be main focus of government plans to reform disability and sickness benefits, says thinktank
We are less than three weeks away from the government’s spring statement (in practice, a mini-budget – not that the Treasury like, or use the term) and today the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have both published reports considering some of the chancellor’s options.
The Resolution Foundation focuss on the plans to reform working-age sickness benefits. It says that freezing these benefits would only save £1bn a year by the end of this parliament, and that cuts could have a big impact on some claimants. It says the government should focus on changing the way these benefits operate, not just reducing eligibility.
The report is here. And in its summary the thinktank says:
One possible route to stemming rising benefit spending is to restrict eligibility for support. The previous government proposed changes to the universal credit work capability assessment (WCA) in Autumn 2023, aiming to reduce incapacity benefit spending. However, its consultation on these changes was ruled unlawful earlier this year.
The report cautions that repeating this approach is risky as it would concentrate all the income losses on a small group of claimants.
The scale of losses faced by newly ineligible incapacity benefit claimants is due to the large gap between basic and health-related support in universal credit (UC). For a single adult, basic support of just £393 a month more than doubles to £810 a month if they are eligible for health-related support. This creates a strong incentive to claim the latter.
The government should look to close this gap by redistributing levels of health-related support into basic awards. If the government is committed to making cuts in the short term, it could reduce the gap by freezing health-related support in cash terms between 2025-26 and 2029-30, saving £1bn a year by the end of the parliament.
The report notes that an often-forgotten driver of rising spending, where there is ample room for improvement, is the terrible record of people moving off incapacity and disability benefits.
In its report the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the chancellor may cut spending or put up taxes in the spring statement if she is breaking her fiscal rules. But it also suggests that these rules could be improved.
While there is no such thing as an optimal fiscal framework, it is hard to believe that the UK’s could not be improved. In an uncertain and volatile world, aiming to meet pass–fail fiscal rules with close to zero headroom leaves fiscal policy entirely exposed to global economic developments (or, more accurately, what the OBR judges the impact of those economic developments might be) and puts the chancellor’s (sensible) promise to make fiscal policy changes only once a year at risk. If there is a material change then policy should of course adjust. But the twice-yearly fine-tuning of policy in response to immaterial forecast revisions is an increasingly costly distraction from the big issues.
Green party backs Sentencing Council and criticises Labour for accepting ‘ridiculous’ Tory ‘two-tier justice’ claims
The Green party has urged the Sentencing Council to stick to its new guidance saying judges should normally get pre-sentence reports for some categories of offenders. (See 9.46am.) The government and the opposition are both saying the guidelines should be withdrawn. But Siân Berry, the Green party MP, said:
Failure to implement these changes would be a serious mistake, causing genuine harm to women, families and young people for whom these new recommendations will create much safer sentencing.
Contrary to reporting, nowhere does the guidance focus primarily on ethnicity. Instead, the guidance, based on strong evidence, helps improve sentencing of women, including pregnant women and parents, and young adults, for whom custodial sentences do huge amounts of harm including to their loved ones and wider society.
Ethnicity and other protected characteristics are mentioned simply so that judges are reminded to consider unconscious bias and that the personal circumstances of offenders may be different than assumed. Bowing to the opposition’s ridiculous accusation of ‘two tier justice’ clearly serves to divide people when we all want to build a genuinely fair and effective justice system.
