Starmer rejects criticism of defence spending after being accused of complacency – UK politics live | Politics

Badenoch says she met Robertson last year to discuss the defence review.

Will the PM approve an upgrade that will affect HMS Dragon?

Starmer says HMS Dragon was commissioned by the last government.

He attacks Badenoch again over her record on the war.

He claims she insulted British pilots, accusing them of hanging around.

He says she is not serious.

Badenoch says this is a moment of profound national seriousness. But what are Labour doing – promoting sex toys in parliament.

That gives new meaning to the phrase fiddling while Rome burns.

Badenoch asks if the billions saved from ditching the Chagos deal will go into defence.

Starmer says the goverment is already spending more on defence. The armed forces have had the biggest pay rise for years, he says.

Badenoch says Starmer loves to misrepresent her position on the war.

She offers again to help Starmer find welfare cuts to fund higher defence spending.

Starmer ridicules Badenoch’s suggestion that she was talking about the UK offering the US just verbal support.

Badenoch says talking about an increase is not the same as giving an increase. The defence investment plan was meant to be published last autumn. “What’s the hold up?”

Starmer says he has set out his case. Badenoch called for the UK to jump into the war. He says Tory MPs shouted “shame” at him in the Commons when he declined to back the war.

He says Badenoch made the mother of all U-turns.

Lindsay Hoyle intervenes, saying it is prime minister’s questions.

Badenoch asks why the defence investment plan cannot be published before the end of this session of parliaement.

Starmer says defence spending is at a record level. Defence spending went down from 2.5% to 2.1% under the Tories. Minesweepers and destroyers were cut, he says.

Kemi Badenoch asks why Lord Robertson had “corrosive complacency” on defence.

Starmer says he respects Robertson. But he does not agree with him on this. He has committed twice to raising defence spending, including by cutting aid, a difficult decision.

The defence investment plan will be published as soon as possible, he says.

Lauren Edwards (Lab) says the PM was right not to take the UK into the war against Iran. She asks what he is doing to support the armed forces, and to prepare for all eventualities.

Starmer says the government is investing in the armed forces, improving their homes, and improving recruitment. But the most important decisions are those about going to war, he says.

Keir Starmer starts by saying he will keep his promise to deliver a Hillsborough law.

James Murray, chief secretary to the Treasury, has said balancing welfare and defence spending “is not a zero-sum game”, amid stark warnings that the UK will have to increase its military budget to ensure national security during global volatility. Pippa Crerar has the story.

PMQs is starting soon.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said that until recently he believed stories about Peter Mandelson maintaining a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s first conviction for child sex offences were “overblown”.

In his interview with Woman’s Hour, Streeting also claimed that he did not read the Financial Times story in 2023 saying that Mandelson stayed in Epstein’s house in New York while Epstein was in jail in 2009 – and that when he saw references to this on social media, he dismissed it as trolling.

Pointing out that Mandelson hosted a podcast for the Times until he was made ambassador to the US, Streeting also claimed that the media should have scrutinised Mandelson more intensely.

In the past Streeting and Mandelson were regarded as friends and allies, leading figures on the Labour right. But, after the full extent of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein emerged with the release of the Epstein files earlier this year, leading to Mandelson’s arrest over allegations that he leaked confidential government information to Epstein, Streeting abruptly distanced himself from the peer.

In a move that seemed intended to ensure the Mandelson link did not harm in a potential Labour leadership content, Streeting pre-emptively published the WhatsApp messages they had shared (ahead of their official release due to the Commons humble address vote). In an article for the Guardian, he also declared: “Contrary to what has been widely reported, I was not a close friend of Peter Mandelson.”

On Woman’s Hour, the presenter, Nuala McGovern, asked Streeting how it was possible that he did not know about how Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein extended beyond the first conviction. What it because he had not seen the 2023 reports, or because they did not concern him?

Streeting said he had not seen the reports. He went on:

I’ll be honest, when people would pop up on social media laying those sorts of charges, they tended to be the sort of people who appear in your timeline trolling. And I just didn’t think it could be credible that [Mandelson] would have had that kind of relationship.

Asked to explain this more, Streeting said the original report was not “a big story at the time”, and he had not read it at the time.

This showed how Mandelson was not being held to account, he said.

So, the FT did a report, but I don’t remember seeing it in other newspapers. Mandelson still had a podcast. He was appearing regularly on really big news programmes. And so, to be honest, the only time I remember seeing stuff, Mandleson/Epstein, you just think, ‘I haven’t seen that from a credible news source, he hasn’t been questioned, I think that must be overblown’.

Asked if he questioned his judgment now, Streeting replied: “Of course, absolutely.”

He said there has been a political failure to ask Mandelson full questions about his ongoing relationship with Epstein. “It is also, I think, a media failure,” he said.

And, linking to the main subject of his interview (see 10.13am), he concluded:

I think it stems from the same root cause, which is those women [Epstein’s victims], those girls, not being taken seriously enough, their experiences not mattering enough and being prioritised. And that is exactly the sort of sexism and misogyny at the root of the issue, I’m afraid. And I think all of us have to take responsibility for that.

In the light of what George Robertson, who led the strategic defence review for Labour, said about defence spending in his speech last night, there’s a good chance Kemi Badenoch will choose to raise this at PMQs later.

She may well raise the Times’s splash, which says Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is proposing to raise defence spending by less than £10bn over the next four years.

In their story, Steven Swinford and Larisa Brown report:

The State of It political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times has been told that Reeves is unwilling to break her fiscal rules or increase taxes to boost defence spending.

John Healey, the defence secretary, is pressing for a bigger increase as there are concerns that £10bn will not be enough, given the increasing likelihood that British forces will be deployed to Ukraine and the Middle East.

The internal rows over defence spending have led to more than six months of delays to the publication of the defence investment plan, which is supposed to set out the blueprint for funding over the next decade.

The Guardian is siding with Reeves, not Robertson, in this argument. Here is our leader on the topic.

And here is an extract.

Lord Robertson produced his first SDR as Tony Blair’s defence secretary in 1998, and the historian David Edgerton noted then that Britain was committing itself “to acting primarily with the USA in a wide-ranging programme of global policing”. The structure of the armed forces is designed not for autonomous defence but because “the composition … is what allows Britain to be the USA’s principal partner”. Only 15% to 20% of spending, Prof Edgerton reckoned, related to purely national defence. In that sense, the model Lord Robertson now defends was never primarily about defending the UK at all. It was about plugging into a US system and piggybacking on its arms industry base.

The Treasury is right to question prioritising defence now. Cutting welfare would hit demand and weaken growth. As Khem Rogaly of the Common Wealth thinktank argues, defence spending provides a weak economic stimulus compared with public investment – and is even worse as a job creator. Moreover, the UK is not using higher defence spending to build its own independent military, but to reshape its armed forces around a US-style venture capital and tech ecosystem. With Mr Trump in office, there is no better time to ask: whose security are we funding – Britain’s or America’s?

On Woman’s Hour Wes Streeting has just referred to the “BBC graph” illustrating his point about how waiting times for women were growing under the Tories more than they were for men. (See 10.13am.)

He was talking about this chart showing how between February 2020 and January 2026 the gynaecological waiting list in England doubled.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is taking questions on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour now about the women’s health strategy for women. You can listen here.

Explaining why the women’s health strategy has been reissued, he cited two factors.

In part, the failure to deliver timely access to care for women can be explained by the generally poor performance we saw in the NHS, which was declining year on year [before Labour took office].

We started to arrest that decline. Waiting lists are now falling but – and the BBC’s data and report today shows this really clearly – while it is true to say that waiting lists rose for the general population, they rose even faster and higher in women’s health care, particularly around the [gynaecology] waiting list, for example.

And I think that is a symptom of a deeper culture … which is a culture of medical misogyny, sexism in the NHS, both conscious and unconscious bias, which means even in an NHS that’s getting worse or was getting worse for everyone, it was getting disproportionately worse for women.

JL Partners has not yet published the details of its May elections poll featured in the Telegraph’s splash. But here is some details from Tony Diver’s Telegraph write-up.

On Wales

The Telegraph’s projection shows that Plaid will be the largest party in Wales for the first time, winning 33 of the 96 seats, followed by Reform with 29 and Labour with 17.

On English local elections

Of the 136 English local authorities facing elections, Labour currently controls or is the coalition leader in 83.

The party could suffer its worst night in local election history – winning just 42 authorities – with almost half of that total in London.

On London

The expected Green surge in the capital will split the Left vote, but Zack Polanski’s party is set to gain control of just two of London’s 32 boroughs.

However, it will come second in many of the other 19 London councils Labour is on course to hold.

On Reform UK gains

At the highest end of predicted results, Nigel Farage’s party would gain control of up to 69 councils – half of the number voting this year – by gaining support from Labour voters in the Red Wall and Conservatives in the East of England.

Even on a more modest prediction, it would net 56 councils, compared with 42 for Labour, 17 for the Liberal Democrats and 15 for the Conservatives.

On Tory losses

Kemi Badenoch’s Blue Wall of shire councils across the south of England is also set to crumble.

Reform is on course to seize Essex, the county council including Mrs Badenoch’s own constituency, along with Suffolk and Norfolk.

The Tories are also on course to lose East Sussex, West Sussex and Hampshire, finishing second or third behind either the Lib Dems or Reform. The Tories’ vote share could fall as low as 15 per cent in East Sussex …

With new boundaries in the Tory stronghold of Surrey, the Conservatives are also set to lose both East and West Surrey, slumping from an overall vote share of 42 per cent in the county five years ago to 24 per cent.

UPDATE: The JL Partners polling is now available here.

Iran war truth-telling in government seems to be spreading. After Rachel Reeves described Donald Trump’s war as “folly”, Keir Starmer made a point of saying that it was helping Vladimir Putin.

The comment came in the readout issued by Downing Street of Starmer’s meeting yesterday with his Dutch counterpart, Rob Jetten. Normally these readouts are bland to the point of meaningless, but on this occasion someone decided to include a line about who is gaining most from Trump’s folly.

A No 10 spokesperson said:

Turning to recent events in the Middle East, the prime ministers updated on their recent diplomatic meetings, including Prime Minister Starmer’s visit to the Gulf, and Prime Minister Jetten’s meetings in Washington.

The summit on the strait of Hormuz on Friday would be a vital moment to continue to drive diplomatic, military and economic work, the leaders underlined.

Both also reiterated their deep concern at the situation in Lebanon and the need for deescalation. On Ukraine, the prime minister thanked Prime Minister Jetten for The Netherlands’ unwavering support and reflected on Ukraine’s momentum on the battlefield.

Putin was benefiting from the events in the Gulf, and it was vital partners looked at how they could step up pressure on Russia to mitigate that, the prime minister added.

This article by Simon Goodley last week explains why Russia is doing so well from the war.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is in Washington where later she will be meeting the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. Yesterday he defended the war against Iran, saying “small bit of economic pain” was worth the long-term security benefits. He told the BBC:

I wonder what the hit to global GDP would be if a nuclear weapon hit London… I am saying that I am less concerned about short-term forecasts, for long-term security.

Reeves, who is in charge of an economy that will suffer more than any other in the G7 as a resut of the war, according to the IMF, is unlikey to agree. Yesterday she called the war “folly”.

It shoud be a lively meeting.

Graeme Wearden has more on this on his business live blog.

Good morning. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is publishing a revised women’s health strategy for England today. As Andrew Gregory reports, the strategy implicitly accepts that women have been let down by a (largely male) medical establishment which has not always taken their health concerns seriously.

But, for Labour, this is not just a health announcement. The English local elections are just over three weeks away, and Labour is using this announcement as a platform to attack Reform UK, saying that Nigel Farage’s party can’t be trusted to stand up for women.

Labour HQ has sent out a briefing note backing up this claim with this list of 10 reasons why is says Reform are not on the side of women. For the record, here is the list in full.

1. Reform want to reopen the debate on abortion limits

Nigel Farage has described the current 24-week abortion limit as “utterly ludicrous” and called for Parliament to revisit it – raising concerns about rolling back long-established reproductive rights.

2. Reform figures have questioned women’s bodily autonomy

Senior Reform figure, Danny Kruger MP, has argued that women do not have an “absolute right” over their own bodies in the context of abortion, undermining a fundamental principle of women’s healthcare and rights.

3. Reform would scrap the Equality Act

Suella Braverman MP, Reform’s equalities spokeswoman, has pledged to repeal the Equality Act – removing key legal protections against sex discrimination in workplaces, services and public life.

4. Reform have links to anti-abortion campaigns

Farage has accepted payment to speak at events linked to anti-abortion groups, while candidates with similar views are standing for the party – raising concerns about the direction of travel.

5. Reform would roll back workplace protections

Plans to scrap the Employment Rights Act would put at risk protections for maternity leave, workplace discrimination and job security – undermining progress made for women at work.

6. Reform would bring back the two-child benefit limit

This policy disproportionately impacts women, particularly single mothers, pushing families into poverty and limiting financial support for children.

7. Reform figures have made regressive comments about women at work

Farage has previously backed claims that employers avoid hiring women because of maternity rights – echoing outdated attitudes that penalise women for having families.

8. Reform figures have criticised breastfeeding in public

Farage has suggested women should not breastfeed in a way that is “openly ostentatious” – policing women’s behaviour in public spaces.

9. Reform has platformed and defended controversial figures

Farage has described Andrew Tate as an “important voice for men”, despite widespread concern about misogyny and the impact of such views on young people.

10. Reform’s record on violence against women raises serious concerns

The party is considering bringing back former MP James McMurdock, who was jailed for assaulting his then-girlfriend.

Commenting on this, Anna Turley, the Labour chair, said:

Today Labour is taking action to fix a system that has too often ignored women – cutting waiting lists, improving care and putting women’s voices at the centre.

But Reform’s record speaks for itself. From attacking reproductive rights to undermining protections at work, they simply can’t be trusted to stand up for women.

Reform UK has been approached for a comment. I’ll post it when I get a reply.

Farage is probably more interested in the Telegraph splash. It reports the findings of a poll by JL Partners which, as well as saying Labour is on course to lose power in Wales (no surprise), also says “Labour is also facing a Reform rout across England, with the near-total collapse of the Red Wall and the loss of stronghold councils held since the 1970s.”

James Johnson, the co-founder of JL Partners, told the Telegraph:

If these results come to pass, we will be looking at a major political earthquake across Britain.

It could be the worst local election ever for Labour in England, a collapse for the Conservatives in their historic Blue Wall heartlands, and a brutal third place for Starmer’s party in Wales.

One cannot overstate how seismic that result in Wales would be – it is a place that has stayed Labour even in the party’s darkest days. Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and the Greens are all contributing to this, but it is Reform that looks set to be the real story, potentially moving into opposition in Wales and securing England councils across the country.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Russell Findlay, the Scottish Tory leader, holds a campaign event on postal voting. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is doing a separate event at 10am on maternity services, and John Swinney, the first minister and SNP leader, is campaigning in South Ayrshire at 2pm.

10am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour speaking about the government’s women’s health strategy, ahead of speaking at a formal launch at 11am.

11am: Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, speaks at a Green event about ending the “normalisation” of food bank use.

Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

3.15pm (UK time): Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, speaks at a CBNC event in Washington, where she is attending IMF spring summit meetings. She also has a meeting at some point with her US counterpart, Scott Bessent.

3.45pm (UK time): John Healey, the defence secretary, is expected to speak at a press conference in Berlin after a meeting of fellow defence ministers from the Ukraine Defence Contact Group.

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