Labour claims Reform UK won’t protect women, as poll suggests Farage’s party heading for ‘seismic’ wins in May – UK politics live

Poll projects major political earthquake across Britain with Labour losing Wales and England’s Red Wall 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. 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. 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? Continue reading...