Prime Minister’s Questions today was ostensibly about the Defence Investment Plan – or its absence. But Kemi Badenoch was really using the DIP in her six questions to build her narrative about Keir Starmer being unable to take any of the big decisions. He was, she said repeatedly, ‘paralysed’.
The Prime Minister, who loves to lecture other politicians on how they should conduct themselves, also very much enjoys telling the same politicians that he will be taking no lectures from them
Given Starmer refused in all of those questions to give any further details about the DIP other than that it would be coming ‘before the Nato summit’ at the start of July, Badenoch could have ended up looking like she was just churning through the same question without making progress. But she managed to vary those questions and extract further information from the Prime Minister. He also twice avoided ruling out raising taxes to fund the DIP, which moved the story on enough to make it more than just ‘Starmer won’t say when defence plan due’.
Initially, Badenoch asked him to confirm whether the DIP would ‘finally’ be published this week, to which he replied that ‘we’ve already taken a number of measures’ and ‘are committed to publishing the defence investment plan before the Nato summit’. The Tory leader replied, ‘that sounded like a no: we have wasted two years waiting for the defence investment plan’.
She pointed out that military chiefs had said the DIP would need £28 billion to be fully funded, and asked ‘will that requirement be met in full?’ Starmer said ministers were ‘working through the details to make sure we get this right’, and argued that while defence spending had fallen under the last government, it has risen to 2.6 per cent of GDP under Labour which was ‘making investment to safeguard our national security’.
Badenoch took that assertion apart, telling the chamber that Starmer was in fact talking about ‘hopeful increases which we still don’t know if he will do because there is no defence investment plan.’ She accused him of ‘total paralysis’ and said Labour would be giving the armed forces ‘less than half of the minimum that they need’.
In return, Starmer returned to his old theme of the Conservatives cutting the size of the army and leaving morale in the armed forces at an ‘all-time low’. He said he would ‘take no lectures from them about the security of our country’. The Prime Minister, who loves to lecture other politicians on how they should conduct themselves, also very much enjoys telling the same politicians that he will be taking no lectures from them.
Badenoch pointed out again that there was ‘still no defence investment plan’, and joked ‘he is the Prime Minister now – at least I think he is – should I be calling Andy Burnham?’ She said he didn’t know where the money for the DIP was coming from and this was the cause of the delay. The Tory leader then asked him to rule out raising taxes to fund the defence plan, which he did not do. Instead, he mocked the Tories and continued to talk about their legacy, which he always does when he has nothing to say about what he is actually doing in government. In his answer to the fifth question, he returned to his ‘we aren’t going to take lectures on defence from the party opposite’ – which is now another way of saying ‘I am not going to answer questions on this matter from the party opposite’.
In her final question, the leader of the opposition accused Starmer of being ‘too weak: too weak to make a decision, too weak to face down his backbenchers’ on cutting the welfare bill and funding defence properly. She added: ‘As the sun sets on his premiership, he is scrabbling around for a legacy: the real legacy will be a bloated welfare state and weakened armed forces.’
Starmer responded by talking about the Tory failure to address either of these matters, which is hardly inspiring stuff. His weakness was indeed very much on show again at PMQs, and not just in his answers: his backbenchers barely seemed to be listening, let alone cheering for him.
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