Andy Burnham stood at the despatch box for only his second PMQs as Prime Minister today, and he still cannot bring himself to say a simple word: yes. Yes, to funding our Armed Forces properly. Yes, to protecting British sovereign territory. Yes, to putting national security ahead of an ever-swelling welfare bill.
Pressed by Kemi Badenoch on how he intends to pay for defence, Mr Burnham refused, again, to commit to spending 3 per cent of GDP by 2030, retreating instead to a vague promise of 3.5 per cent by 2035, a full decade away. As Mrs Badenoch rightly pointed out, the threats to this country are not five, or ten, years off. They are here now, whether it is Russian aggression in the North Sea or Argentina once again eyeing the Falklands.
Rather than answer for his own Government’s dithering, Mr Burnham chose to protect the benefits budget instead, insisting that trimming housing benefit would tip families into homelessness. It is the same tired routine: whenever Labour is asked to make a hard choice, welfare wins and defence loses. Mr Burnham even admitted, in as many words, that national security “can’t come at the expense of social security,” a telling order of priorities from a Prime Minister who claims to take Britain’s defence seriously.
Worse, Mr Burnham could not even bring himself to say whether his own Chancellor was right to resign as Defence Secretary over exactly this failure to hit the 3 per cent target. That resignation should have been a wake-up call. Instead, the Prime Minister brushed past it, offering only warm words about the Chancellor’s “commitment” while refusing to fund that commitment with a single extra pound.
Then there is the £35 billion giveaway of the Chagos Islands, a deal inherited from Sir Keir Starmer that Mr Burnham has chosen to press ahead with regardless of the cost to taxpayers or the risk it poses to Britain’s remaining overseas territories. Mrs Badenoch was blunt: how can voters trust a Government to defend the Falklands when it is busy signing away sovereign territory elsewhere? Mr Burnham had no real answer, only the claim that Britain will not surrender its base at Diego Garcia, as if that settles the matter of the billions being handed to Mauritius.
Even on foreign policy, the Government’s judgement looks shaky. Fresh sanctions on Israeli settlers, unveiled by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, have already prompted Israel to shut Britain’s consulate in Jerusalem and drawn a stinging rebuke from the Chief Rabbi, who called it a “dark day” for British Jews. Mr Burnham dressed this up as Britain “standing with the underdog,” but plenty on his own backbenches, let alone in the country, will wonder whether picking this fight was worth the diplomatic fallout.
What we saw today was a Prime Minister long on slogans about “the Labour way” and painfully short on substance. Council housebuilding, mental health support, a review from Alan Milburn: all offered up as the alternative to a fully funded defence budget. It amounts to yet more delay dressed up as compassion, while the bill for welfare climbs from £333 billion toward £407 billion under the OBR’s own projections.
Kemi Badenoch put it best: this is not leadership, it is vibes. Britain deserves a Government that will fund its Armed Forces without flinching, defend its territory without apology, and stop treating the welfare budget as untouchable while everything else is negotiable. On the evidence of today’s PMQs, Andy Burnham is not that Prime Minister. He is, as Mrs Badenoch said, simply continuity Keir.
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