Defence Spending and Ukraine Conflict Dynamics

This is the Guardian . That is why today I'm calling on tech comp anies operating in this country to introduce device controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images. directly to Putin. I said okay I'm ready to meet. Why didn't you just say it straight out? I think West Streeting seems to have launched a leadership uh contest so if that is running I would seek to join it. I'm Pippa Carrera and I'm Kieran Stacey. And you're listening to Politics Weekly for The Guardian. Well, we're back in Westminster. I was out on the road last week, Kieran, on the election campaign trail, and Kier Starmer has been doing his big international set piece event with Vladimir Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, with Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, and with of course Immanuel Macron, who he greeted very warmly on the streets of Daniel Street last night. This is the E3 plus Ukraine talking about all the issues out of uh Ukraine security that that all those governments are concerned about. But what I found very striking was that Kirstamer, who has for weeks been facing sort of discontent bubbling up on his own back benches, this sort of weird shadow leadership contest with West Streeting and Andy Burnham, even though there's not yet a vacancy, that's almost like turned his back on it and is getting on, not just getting on with the job, but is focusing on an area that he is actually regarded as being doing pretty well on, the international stage. And I don't know whether it's denial or whether it's his attempt to show everyone that he is up to the job or whether in fact you, know, he sees this as being more important that anything anything that's going on inside the Labour Party. But it read feels like a bit of sort of like a jarring contrast. Yeah, but it's a very Keir Stummer response, isn't it, to kind of get your head down, put the blinkers on and plough on with what you were going to do regardless. It reminds me of those reports we've been getting from Cabinet over the last few weeks where he's just completely refused to talk to anybody about the possibility of a leadership challenge or any kind of transition to another Labour lead er. But I I think even though that that might be his public posture, you can start to tell that Keir Starmer is starting to think about what might happen, presuming Andy Burnham wins the maker field by election, what would happen if there's going to be a challenge? And it started to feel to me, and this is maybe an overused word, but he's starting to think about his legacy. I know that allies of his deny that it's uh about legacy, they're saying this is more of a reset moment. But there there are we're told there are kind of three big things that he wants to achieve in the next few months, just in case. Yeah, and I was having conversations with cabinet ministers at the end of last week and they were telling me that those three things are a social media ban. We've heard about that a lot since he came to power and it's not actually happened, social media ban for under sixteens, uh the defence investment plan, so working at how much money the armed forces are actually going to get at a time where the world is incredibly volatile. And the third one is the EU reset summit, which we're expecting next month, which is slightly an odd one when you consider that governments normally like to negotiate with prime ministers they think are in a position to follow through on whatever they offer up. But nevertheless, the fact that cabinet ministers, and that includes some people who are generally quite or have been quite supportive of Keir Starmer, are starting to talk in those terms do make it look like he is at least starting to think about what his legacy might be. Now, as you rightly say, his allies uh are very clear that as far as they're concerned, that this is about him sharing actually flexing a bit of muscle really showing that he can deliver real sort of tangible gains in government um and and therefore trying to convince his own backbenchers to stick with him should Andy Burnham indeed win in Maker field and end up challenging him for the leadership. Yeah, I mean just but we I think we should maybe deal with each of those uh legacy issues in turn. But I I I do think that if Andy Burnham does win in Makerfield and launches a Labour leadership challenge, then the polls are so clear that he would win it. I cannot imagine a scenario in which Keir Starmer really does decide to fight out of well. I mean what a messy outcome that would be to have a prime minister involved in that. And we uh many of our listeners will have probably been tearing their hair out to be in this position yet again where another government is considering changing their leader. But we've often heard the sort of the phrase leaders wanting to leave on their own terms in the past. And a couple of people have sort of said to me, you know, Kier would want to leave in his own terms. Kirstarmer would a couple of people said to me, Kirstarmer would want to leave in his own terms. Now what that actually looks like and whether you can do that if you're tanking in the polls, if your parliamentary party is turned against you, if that ends up being what happens. And if there's sort of an an obvious apparent successor, it does increasingly feel that it'd be quite difficult for him to set out, well, you know, let's do this one-year transition or whatever it might be. And certainly people within the Burnham camp that I've spoken to, while they don't want to talk about things like coronations, um I d and and there are obviously questions around legitimacy about somebody just sort of being handed the leadership without it being a proper contest, um, certainly might put pressure on him to call a general election, for example, although he ruled out a snap election to me last week when we met in Makerfield. I think what the Burnham Camp are hoping is not that uh that he has to go in and sort of say, knock on the door of Downing Street and say right here it's time to move on but that here starmer and those people around them recognise that from themselves and that there isn't sort of this we hear a lot from senior labour people that they don't want to to uh look like they're focused focusing inwards and focusing on what's happening inside the party rather than the rest of the country. And I think they recognise even Keirstarmer's allies recognise that a leadership contest has the danger of doing that. Let's deal with each of the things that Keirstarmer wants to achieve over the next few months in turn, starting with social media, because as we're talking this morning on Monday morning, uh the Prime Minister has been giving a press conference, or rather been speaking at London Tech Week, uh, announcing that he is going to take measures to stop children sending and receiving nude pictures of themselves. And this, I think, is kind of step one towards the eventual announcement of whatever's going to come out of the uh consultation on social media ban for the sixteen's. Now, reports suggest that where the Prime Minister is likely to be headed on that under-16s ban is some kind of hybrid where some sites get banned and some functionalities get banned, so things like auto-scrolling and uh addictive features like that get banned, but then other sites don't get banned. And you've heard of one particular site that Downing Street is is worried about, you know, does really doesn't want to ban, right? Yeah. And that one is YouTube because while of course children can go down or under 16s can go down rabbit holes on YouTube, it is used very frequently by schools as an educational tool. And you know, my own children come home and do their history homework by watching videos on YouTube. Um, and I'm sure that they they all do it in class as well. So I I think what Dyny Street wants to do is to make sure that the sort of the harmful elements of uh social media are for children are removed, but keep the elements but making sure it's pragmatic, make sure it's practical. And I think that's one of the things they picked up from talking to the Australians who've obviously done it about their own ban, is that they want to make sure that it's is not just pragmatic for users, but it's also enforceable. However, I just would say that so much of this seems to be reliant on the tech firms playing ball. We had another example of that this morning. Keir Star mer was delivering an ultimatum to the tech firms to act and a warning that if they didn't when it came to making sure that children couldn't share sexualised images of themselves, that then the government would change the law. But this is what frustrates his MPs about him is that he talks the talk, but then he doesn't necessarily, you know, follow up with the action. And if he were to then act big eventually, um, you know, he's lost goodwill along the way. Yeah, yeah. He is the Prime Minister. He has a majority in the House of Commons. He can do things. Uh and I th I think it feels like this Prime Minister often acts like those things are not true. It it's really interesting as well just talking about how much this relies on the tech companies because I tell you also as a parent whose kids use YouTube, one thing that made a big difference for us was when YouTube themselves uh merged their YouTube kids app with the main YouTube app. So it used to be you could on your smart TV just get YouTube kids and you could limit your kids to watching that and that was relatively safe. Now they have to go through the main app and you can put all the parental safe you know features on, but it's not quite the same as having a special dedicated. Kids always find a way to get around these things. Exactly. So it you know, if you look at the way these tech companies are behaving themselves, they're not behaving in a way that suggests that they're going to completely play ball with whatever they get told to do at the end of this consultation. No, we should just very quickly talk about the second of those areas, which of course is the European Union Reset Summit. Now, Keir Starmer has good relationships with individual European leaders, and the UK has been trying to uh work behind the scenes with the Commission to basically align as closely as possible to to free up trade , smooth trade, which they argue will benefit the British economy. But they have found on several occasions recently that of course it's not just too up to us going in and saying this is what we want, it's up to the EU side as well. What we've already found to our cost is that if we go in with a proposal, for example, a couple of weeks ago asking for single market for goods, as our colleague Jennifer Rankin revealed, the EU then rejected it. So it's not easy. We have a domestic political backdrop where Europe and even the prospect of rejoining the European Union has been on the table again because of um the Labour leadership, the shadow Labour leadership contest as we should call it. So it's a very live issue, but negoti ations are hard and they will be made harder if the European Union thinks it's about to be a different Prime Minister coming into Downing Street who might have a different set of demands. Okay, well let's pause here for a minute and when we come back we'll be talking about Ukraine 33 days, 33 episodes, no off-switch. From the goals and the glory to the politics en de problems of the World Cup. If you want soccer analysis from a podcast that's been overanalysing the game for more than 20 years, then this is it. Join me, Max Rushton, and our expert team of soccer journalists. Every day of the tournament, can England end 60 years of hurt, or will this be another year of falling just short? Probably. World Cup Daily, listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube . Uh welcome back. Um Pippa, we mentioned in the first half of this podcast that uh Keir Starmer wants to achieve three things before he leaves office, if he is to leave office, one of which is uh some kind of announcement on a social media ban for under 16s. One is this EU reset summit and the final one is the Defence Investment Plan. And this is particularly valid today because Keir Starmer has met Vladimir Zelensky and European leaders in Downing Street. I'm guessing their message on defence spending must have been pretty stark. Uh and to have had this defence investment plan delayed for so long and possibly facing another further delay is probably not the message that the Prime Minister wanted to take It's been a constant thread, hasn't it, over Keir Starmer's premiership? And actually to be fair for Rishi Sunak before him as to whether the government was spending enough on defence in a world where there is a conflict on the eastern bord ers of Europe, Ukraine and Russia, and there's obviously lots of other volatile flashpoints around the world, Iran being the most notable one as we as we talk today. And what the government has been promising for a long time is to uh make sure that the armed forces have what they need. And we seem to have reached a point where the MOD had asked for an 18 billion pound increase. And what's happened is that the Treasury inevitably has looked at that and said that 's a lot of money. And given everything that's going on in the Middle East, we're expecting the economy to be more dramatically hit, the real economy to be more dramatically hit by that towards the end of the summer as we go on uh into the autumn. And people are already feeling pressures over things like energy costs and the domestic bills, the government is having to sort of balance cost of living support for people with spending in other areas. And what we understand is that the Treasury's turned around and said you can't have that much. We can't afford eighteen billion pound s. If that money is to be found, then it has to come from other capital spending departments across government. And one of the things that Rachel Reeves' Chancellor has always said, and indeed Keir Starmer, is that they want to invest for the long term and after years of governments not spending on capital projects, that they want to commit to train lines in the north and net zero infrastructure and yet it looks like those will be the bits that we paired back in order to be able to fund this defence investment plan which of course we're expecting as early as later this week. Yeah I think it's probably very frustrating for some of the departmental ministers in Whitehall because they're told to focus on growth, they're told to get money out on capital projects, and then there's a problem with the MOD budget for whatever reason, and suddenly those budgets are exactly the ones getting raided. So apparently transport is going to get hit, and the energy department, I mean, they're both heavy capital spenders, and the energy department, particularly some of the money that it had allocated for carbon capture and storage schemes, might be taken away as well. I think one of the reasons it's really frustrating for ministers is because Rachel Reeves changed the fiscal rules, as we've talked about before on this podcast, to be able to allow more capital spending. So there are ways in which you could set up things like the energy department's capital spending to make sure it didn't really measure against your targets and and you know there's various ways in which you can account for that to be able to spend much more money on that rather than having to come back and every time that another department asked for money you have to come back and chip away at what you've already announced. And then just stepping back from it all a bit and looking at the big picture on defence and the fact that Vladimir Zelensky is in town, there's been what feels like a real shift in the balance of this conflict in the last few weeks and months from a position where Russia seemed to have the upper hand. And certainly Donald Trump, you know, announced that Ukraine had no cards to play, and it felt like this war of attrition which could go on, you know, for a very, very long time to come. And then the shift has kind of happened, not least because of Ukraine's own defence capacity. It's developed drones, which means that it can reach into about seventy percent of Russian territory. And over the last few days we've seen attacks on places like St. Petersburg where you know the Russian elites do live And there was obviously a big international summit there at the time. And so the balance feels like it's shifted, which puts Vladimir Zelensky perhaps in a more powerful position. He wrote this open letter to Vladimir Putin last week calling on him to sit down and have face to face talks, which is obviously one of the things that Donald Trump, who seems to have been distracted away from what's going on in Ukraine to what's happening in the Middle East, has demanded. And yet Vladimir Putin turned around and said no. So you know, when he was actually challenged to sit down and negotiate, he wasn't prepared to do it. Um which says a lot in itself about how committed he is to really to ending the conflict. And at that meeting last night in Downing Street between the UK, France, Germany and Ukraine, there will have been a lot of discussion about were it to reach the point of a ceasefire, who ends up being responsible on the European side, obviously very broad con continent with very broad views on uh towards Ukraine for maintaining European interests um in any ceasefire negotiations. So we're nowhere near the end yet, but it does for the first time feel the balance has shifted a little bit. And in fact, just after we finish this podcast, you are off to interview Vladimir Zelensky yourself. What are you hoping to ask him and what do you think you might say? So I'm gonna be going with Luke Harding, who is a Russia expert at the Guardian, one of our senior international affairs journalists, and we are both going to be interviewing Vlodymy Zelensky and I want to hear from him whether he feels that piece is finally within his grasp and what that might look like. And I'm sure that will have been what was discussed inside Downing Street last night. But I also want to ask him a couple of domestic questions, if you like, what he thinks about our commitment in the UK and other countries in Europe towards defence spending and how important he thinks that we do put our money where our mouth is on that when we talk about European security. And whether he feels he can work with any British leader, bear in mind if Keir Starmer is replaced by Andy Burnham, it would be the fifth British Prime Minister that Vlad Mirzelensky would have dealt with since the reinvasion of Ukraine in twenty twenty two. I suspect he'll say that the commitment comes from the British people rather than the person at the top, probably just as well, really, because he's had to deal with quite a lot of change. Yeah, ask him if he's gonna get on a train and go up to Makerfield just after you speak. Everyone else seems to be. Everybody else in Westminster is. Absolutely. Okay, well, that's all from us. Please like and follow Politics Weekly UK to keep getting our episodes in your feed. And if you have any suggestions or questions for us, please email us at politicsweeklyuk at thegardian.com. That's politicsweeklyuk at thegardian.com. This episode was produced by Sam Grey. Bye-bye. Goodbye. This is the Guardian