JOHN HEALEY’S resignation as Defence Secretary was an Exocet missile fired straight at the heart of Sir Keir Starmer’s government.
His warning was stark, writing in his resignation letter: “I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.”
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John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary was an Exocet missile fired straight at the heart of Sir Keir Starmer’s government Credit: PA
Mr Healey also took aim at Chancellor Rachel Reeves Credit: PA
Healey insisted he had no other option but to resign after, sources claim, he spent many months wrangling with Number 10 and the Treasury to get the cash to meet even the pitiful pledges already made by Starmer to increase defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.6 per cent and eventually to three per cent by the mid-2030s.
It’s bad enough that we have a PM who can’t persuade his own back- benchers to agree to cut a few billion off our ballooning welfare bill.
It’s depressing enough that we have a PM who won’t stand up to climate hysterics like Ed Miliband and drop the ruinous Net Zero madness.
And it’s infuriating that we have a PM who thinks it’s OK to keep spending billions of our taxes on housing illegal migrants in our communities.
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John Healey resigned after months of clashes with Number 10 and the Treasury over defence funding Credit: Getty
We have a PM who won’t stand up to climate hysterics like Ed Miliband and drop the ruinous Net Zero madness – freeing up billions more for defence spending Credit: Alamy
But all of those failures pale into insignificance when it comes to a Prime Minister who CANNOT or WILL NOT spend even the bare minimum needed to protect our nation state.
To govern is to choose, and it is Keir Starmer’s CHOICE not to cut welfare spending, Net Zero costs or do what’s necessary to stop the Channel boats.
Britain currently spends £66billion a year on defence — roughly half what we spend paying the interest on our national debt and a fraction of the £333billion annual welfare bill.
A year ago, amid mounting security threats, the Strategic Defence Review identified our rising military needs.
Yet we have still not seen the Defence Investment Plan, while an internal Ministry of Defence assessment claims an extra £28billion is needed over the next four years just to stand still.
Of course, Healey is not the first defence figure to warn that we are not spending enough — and it has all fallen on deaf ears in Downing Street.
Indeed, as Healey brutally pointed out in his resignation letter, Starmer KNOWS just how grave the threat is because he told Nato only last week that Britain’s intelligence and security agencies believe Russia could attack Britain or our closest allies by as soon as 2030.
The global threats to our security are growing every day, from Russia, China and Iran.
Sure, Starmer talks tough on defence but fine words spoken at a lectern in front of Union flags do not pay for missiles, or aircraft carriers, or tanks, or drones, or body armour, or soldiers’ wages.
There will be those who argue that we cannot afford to spend more on defence.
But the truth is, we can’t afford NOT to spend more on defence.
At the height of World War Two, we were devoting 50 per cent of our national income to the war effort.
Yet despite the real and present danger posed to our country today, all the PM could offer his Defence Secretary was a measly extra £13.5billion, of which only £10billion was new money.
This is a damning indictment of both the priorities of Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
It also exposes what we already know: that this is a Prime Minister who is in office but not in power.
A PM who has not got the authority to order his Chancellor to find the money in Treasury coffers, to persuade his own Labour backbenchers to cut welfare, or to convince his own Cabinet ministers to rein in their spending for the national interest, is out of his depth.
A Prime Minister who cannot or will not do what is necessary to defend our country’s national security is not fit for the job.
END SMOKESCREEN AFTER EVIL ATTACKS
EVENTS in Belfast this week have followed a familiar pattern.
A brutal crime: the barbaric attempt to hack off a man’s head in the street.
Unrest in Belfast following the shocking attack on Stephen Ogilvie Credit: Reuters
The discovery that the suspect is a migrant granted leave to stay in the UK after some cursory paperwork. An outpouring of public anger on social media.
The calls for calm. The violent protests by a few thugs. The condemnation.
That cycle is what happens after every such outrage these days – whether it’s an attempted murder, a rape or a terror attack.
And what follows next is also just as predictable: blaming anyone and everyone except the ACTUAL problem we can see with our own eyes.
Sir Keir Starmer insists that he will “not tolerate” such horrific crimes. But that is not true.
On the contrary, such horrific violence is a price that the Prime Minister and much of the political elite long ago decided is one worth paying in return for their multicultural, “diversity is our strength”, open-borders dream.
Instead of doing anything to stop such evil crimes, Starmer would prefer to blame Nigel Farage, the Far Right, Elon Musk and social media rather than identify the TRUE cause – mass illegal immigration to our country.
It doesn’t matter how many murders happen, how many sexual assaults are carried out by men housed in asylum hotels, or even the deadly terror attacks carried out by people granted refuge in our country – the REAL problem is the rest of us noticing that these supposedly isolated events keep happening again and again, week after week.
So the answer is to stop us noticing and talking about it, with another crackdown on social media, accusing more people of racism and just hoping the anger will die down. Until the next time.
But law-abiding people are growing weary of this cycle of madness. Branding everyone a bigot for speaking out doesn’t work any more and our patience is wearing thin. At some point, the tipping point will be reached.
We can no longer tolerate political leaders who refuse to protect us from the dangers that THEY have brought to our streets.
