John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, is holding a press conference in Bute House in Edinburgh. There is a live feed here. WATCH: First Minister John Swinney outlines what our Budget for Hope and Delivery means for Scotland👇https://t.co/GkurePEvJr.
Swinney scheduled the press conference after his government’s budget was passed at Holyrood yesterday. I won’t be covering it minute by minute, but I will be posting highlights. Yesterday the Institute for Fiscal Studies criticised Keir Starmer for saying that increase in defence spending would be worth £13.4bn a year from 2027. They pointed out that you can only get to this figure by assuming that defence spending would have been frozen in cash terms (instead of going up every year), which is unrealistic. It would be more accurate to describe the extra spending as worth about £6bn a year, the IFS said.
This morning, asked about the £13.4bn figure on BBC Breakfast, John Healey, the defence secretary, confirmed that £6bn was the “real terms” figure for the rise in defence spending. Referring to the £13.4bn cited by the PM, Healey said:. Yes, that’s a cash number. If you did it in real terms, taking in inflation, it would be something over £6bn. Either way, this is a big boost for defence. It’s an increase in defence spending.
It will allow us to strengthen our armed forces, it will allow us to use defence as an engine for driving economic growth in this country so we can put a long-term industrial plan in place to boost British jobs, to boost British businesses and technology.
In response, James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, said the government needed to produce “clarity”. He posted this on social media. Yesterday the PM said defence spending was rising by £13.4bn. Today his Defence Secretary says £6bn. Which is it?.
@KemiBadenoch was only given a redacted version of the PM’s statement before he spoke, missing all the figures. Transparency matters & we urgently need clarity. In fact, we don’t “urgently need clarity”. We have clarity; £6bn is the more accurate figure.
Good morning. At Westminster MPs are still absorbing the implications of Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the aid budget to fund an increase in defence spending. Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey have all the details in their overnight story. John Healey, the defence secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he has faced a lot of questions about whether this announcement was entirely about pleasing Donald Trump. “No, it’s not,” he told Sky News. Healey pointed out that raising defence spending by 2.5% of GDP was a Labour manifesto commitment. (That’s true, but the manifesto did not say it would happen by 2027 – or that aid spending would be cut to fund it.).
But Healey did not try to pretend that the timing of the announcement was unrelated to the fact that Starmer has his first meeting with Trump since the inauguration in the White House tomorrow. “President Trump, over the last two weeks, has been very direct in his challenge,” Healey said.
For Starmer, committing to higher defence spending ahead of the Washington visit is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the meeting to be a success. But slashing aid spending is a hard ask for anyone in the Labour party, and particularly for David Lammy. As foreign secretary, he now controls the international aid budget (because Boris Johnson abolished DfID and made it part of the Foreign Office) and earlier this month Lammy told the Guardian that Trump’s decision to tear up the US aid budget was a “big strategic mistake”. (Lammy was talking to Pippa Crerar about three weeks ago; presumably he would not have said what he did if he knew what was coming in the UK, and so this fits with reports that No 10 only started working up the aid cuts plan about two weeks ago.) Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, posted this on social media yesterday about Lammy’s plight.
This is unfortunate. Lammy self evidently not been able to protect the foreign office budget since only weeks ago urged the US not to cut its aid budget saying it would be a big strategic mistake. By cutting to 0.3% of GDP, the UK, once an aid superpower, joins Italy in the G7 in being one of the least generous of industrialised countries. Fear of Reform, and Trump, drives No 10’s and Treasury choices.
But Lammy has written an article for the Guardian defending the move. It is not clear yet which aspects of the aid budget will be cut the most to fund the extra defence spending, but Lammy says projects in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan will be protected. To make this [higher defence spending] commitment, and stick within our fiscal rules, we have had to make the extremely difficult decision to lower our spending on international development. As the prime minister said, we do not pretend any of this is easy. This is a hard choice that no government – let alone a Labour government – makes lightly. I am proud of our record on international development. It helps address global challenges from health to migration, contributes to prosperity, and supports the world’s most vulnerable people. It grows both our soft power and our geopolitical clout, while improving lives. For all of those reasons, this government remains committed to reverting spending on overseas aid to 0.7% of gross national income when the fiscal conditions allow.
