Vision for defence and national renewal

Sky News, The full story first. is a bit in the dark when it comes to Andy Burnham's plans for defending the UK. This is why How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup Do airPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity Hi I'm Et Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow Hello all new here and as the likelihood that Andy Barnam will be our next prrime Minister grows by the day, so do the questions about what exactly he plans to do when he is. And when it comes to defence, you can certainly understand why. First and most obviously, there's the money. We lost a defence secretary recently, John Heley claiming down Street wouldn't adequately fund our military. Then, there's aAT summit on the seventh of July at which Starmer will be announcing, guess what, his plans for defence spending before heading for the doormarked political exit But more than that, one of the most difficult decisions any politician will ever have to take is whether to agree to military action Burnnam' been there before. If we had left Saddam in place at that time Other people would have suffered. There wasn't a kind of easy answer, was there? Since the Iraq warar of two thousand three, he's certainly moved from full on interventionist to a more nuanced, perhaps at times opaque position. Do we get a sense that he gets it, that he gets the new world that we're living in Tick the cherries out So when it comes to defense, who is Andy Burnham Sky's political correspondent is Rob Powell, Sean Bell is our military analyst Sean, let's get started with you. I mean, just how destabilising, I suppose is the word, is it that currently we have a prime mininister a defense secretary, in all likelihood are not going to be there in a handful of weeks. I think the most critical thing is we're coming up to the seventh and the eighth of next month is this big NATO conference at Anchora. We have as a nation, made some commitments to NATO. Part of that is get three percent GDP spending by twenty thirty, three and a half percent by twenty thirty five. And yet the current plan currently endored by Prime Minister is two point six eight percent. Well sh. And it's comfortably short. We had a strategic defense review. It was accepted that it reflected the risks that face this country. The defeense investment plan, which should have been out over a year ago, has not been properly funded. And therefore, it doesn't matter who's in control. when we get that critical summit The danger, of course, is Annie Burnham iss not going to take over at the very earliest until after that. That leaves a major conundrum for that conference. Really though. You don't mean it doesn't matter who's in the job. What you're actually meaning is, wouldn't it be better if Kir Starmer and whoever is the defefense secretary right now, because it is in a state of flux go and goes as soon as possible so the next lot can actually set out their stall. In some respects, it's about the government's commitment to defence. There's been pretty clear to everybody now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we are in a very dangerous environment. America's support under NATO first looks increasingly fragile. The SDR painted a very, very good picture of what the future looks like unless we start getting to grips with that and funding it properly For most of my military career, we were funding defence at four percent. Certainly in the Cold War, it was all the time. We've saved over a trillion pounds by dropping defence because we haven't needed to spend it. Today, we need to get back to spending. otherwise we're vulnerable and the best way to deter our enemies is to prepare for that conflict I mean, Rob, alth the way down there in Westminster, politically, where do we put Andy Burnham on the kind of the sliding scale of defence? Is he a dove? Is he a haawk? Is he somewhere in between? Andy Burnham's a politician that is generally dealt in the sort of domestic social issues his whole career, whether it was health seecretary during the Blair years, Manchester mayayor He hasn't had a lot to do with foreign affairs or defense. And I think that's why it's quite difficult to sort of get a read on where his instinct lies, kind of where his heart is on some of this stuff. It's also why I think some people think there probably should be a bit more scrutiny and a bit more of a contest to try and get to the bottom of what he thinks. But I think if you were to look back over the times where he has sort of interacted in his career, his voting, record, things like that I don't think you would put him on the extreme in either direction. I think you'd probably say he was quite comfortably in the middle and in the mainstream, generally on defense and foreign affairs issues. He doesn't tend to have had a record of kind of breaking out in a noticeably extreme direction on any issues. But look, I think part of the reason he's being brought in is because he has that closer focus on social domestic issues. and I think that inevitably is going to mean it's going to be interesting to see who he puts around him when it comes to defense and foreign policy because You know What does Andy Burnham think about the sort of tilt of power out East? What does he think about the changing face of warfare in the modern age? It's very hard to answer that question. I imagine there is some deep thinking going on around Andam Burnham right now, but I imagine there is also an attempt to bring in some people that maybe have some deeper experience and background in these areas because it's not the area where Andy Burnham has really worked in his political career so far. But on the biggest foreign policy decision of the last twenty odd years, the decision to go to war in Iraq with the United States. I mean, he was wholeheartedly in support of that. You fast forward a decade and he's supporting strikes on Islamic state within Iraq. Th he find a moral compass or at least a reason to vote in favor of military action when it came to Islamic state in Syria. and I just wonder whether or not. What we have seen from Andy Burnham is kind of political cherry picking of where the best position is at that particular point. Or have we actually seen an evolution in his thinking on defense on war? Yeah, I think to an extent that sort of proof that he has moved with wherever the center of gravity has been, he hasn't necessarily, and that's not to make a kind of moral judgment on each of those votes and each of those issues, but it's just to say that Andy Burnham in all of those hasn't necessarily kicked back or pushed against where it felt the center of gravity in the political mainstream. In terms of Iraq, I was having a little flick through his book that he wrote with Steve Rotham a couple of years ago to try and find references to defense. that there's not a lot around defense, barely anything, if anything in there. But he does have quite an interesting passage about that vote on the Iraq warar. He says in here, this was two years ago, he can still justify now the decision to remove Saddam What I can't justify was the absence of a credible plan to secure the country in the aftermath. Had he known that back then, he would have voted against it. I actually think that maybe his position is still that he would be moving with the political center of gravity in that it feels like The broader political landscape around warars foreign interventions obviously shifted profoundly after Iraq. And I don't think you would find Andy Berham as a prrime Minister kicking back against that consensus too much. I think he clearly would have still been very skeceptical around the Iran war. I think he probably would have been in exactly the same position that Stahmer found himself in terms of not letting the US use UK bases as well. S I just pick up on that in the sense that, well I suppose we have been here before. I mean, Tony Blair arrived in number ten with a blank sheet of paper, headed foreign policy and a blank sheet of paper, headed defense. So what do you think he should be doing? What Rob's described and what you're describing are wars of choice. At the end of the Cold War, everver since then, most of the military leaders have got beltoads of medals because we've been involved almost continuously, whether it' Kosvo, Bosnia, Sarajvo, invasion of Iraq tours in Afghanistan, I spent two years of my life in Afghanistan. The fact remains they were all wars of choice. We chose to do them and we justified doing them. That is not what we're talking about today. What we're talking about today is wars of national survival. It's in a completely different landscape. We've not been investing in that. We're horribly vulnerable, particularly with things like missile defense and the like So I do think whilst people's vote in terms of do you go in these foreign expeditions, that's all jolly interesting, but this is much more profound than that. is how the number one priority of any government is protecting the nation. That's what we're talking about here. Do you think that the public understands the urgency with which we need to get defense sort? Do you think that the public understands the danger the United Kingdom is facing right? No I don't. And I think that's one of the issues that all our politicians, mean let's be brutally honest, most politicians would admit privately that their number one priority is to get reelected. And votes there are no votes in defence. and therefore people have a great deal of confidence, their military is fantastic, they outsourced defence to their military without necessarily feeling the heats I travel through Poland on the way out to Ukraine They feel the heat of the Russian invasion of Ukraine much more intently than we do. They're very happy to spend five percent and they are doing a lot to try and bolster their defenses. We're a thousand plus miles away from the front line. And do we therefore balance welfare, balance healthcare, and balance the war? We don't feel it the same way. And I think a lot of our military, senior leadership believe we've got to have a public debate. Otherwise, if you don't do that Politicians are never going to support the defense spending we need. Rob, do we know definitively yet whether or not Andy Burnham is willing to spend more on defense spend as much as Well, the man he met privately with the other day, John Healy, the former defeense secretary who ligged it because the treasury wouldn't give him the cash. I mean, the only thing I'd say is that he is meeting with a lot of people and a lot of MPs at the moment. I was with one MP last night who Really a rival faction backing a kind of rival part of the party, and they said that they'd had more from Team Burnham in the last few weeks, more interaction with Andy Burnham and Team Burnham that they'd had than they'd had interaction with Kir Starmer and numberumber ten in the last two years. I think when you look at Andy Burnham on sort of face value, you wouldn't necessarily have huge amount of confidence that this is the guy that's going to come in and try and slash the welfare budget money into defense instead. The only kind of counterpoint, the only query I'd have to that is that Pe are saying, lookook, you're about to have a prrime Minister who is very political. He is the opposite of Kir Stammer in that respect. He likes telling stories, he likes he's very good at sort of bringing people along, reaching out to people, convincing people, nudging people, influencing people. That is what sort of makes him tick. So I wouldn't be surprised and I think this is something you'll probably see across lots of different policy areas. you may see Andy Burnham kind of come in, pick up what Kir Stara has maybe done already, but try and find a better way to talk about it, to storytell around it as well there was one thing that has been briefed out and popped up in a few newspapers that struck me as exactly the type of thing you might see a Prime Minister Andy Burnham do. And this is this idea of war bonds sort of harking back to World War I and World War twoI, essentially sort of packaging up debt, getting people to lend you money, be it the public, be it pension funds, be it institutions, but packaging it up as designated investment in the military you could storytell around that, right? That might get you around this problem of getting more money into defence while at the same time starting to make people around the country feel that this is a new age that we are living in, that the dangers are higher as well. because the government so far hasn't been able to do that. And I think until people sort of feel that we've entered a new age when it comes to the threats we face, the consent may well not be there to cut back on things to spend more money on defense How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup Two airPods herald the arrival of a new global order What do LED lights say about the future of humanity I'mt Conway. and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. San, I mean, it would be at this point in the podcast that I would usually ask you, mean, if billions are raised through war bonds, where should he be spending it? The problem is, of course, as you've already mentioned, Kir Starmer is off to NATO in just a handful of days where he will be outlining the defense investment plan, the way in which we spend money as a country to fulfill that strategic defense review last year The frustration is that all the conversation has been tweaking with the Lers. Can I be a little bit less wealthfed, a little bit more NHS, a little bit less rather than actually it feels that there's something broken in this country at the moment. And weve seem to have lost our wayight a little bit. And it's what's the contract with our government? What do we want the government to do for us? But more importantly, what do we need to do for our government Because defence isn't something you could just outsource the military. It's a collective responsibility. And I think things like spend money,'s easy to say, we' put more money into defense at the moment. Even if you had more money, how would you spend it? And what we should be doing is trying to make defense the foundation of growth for this country. We have a fantastic military capability. We're one of the very few nations that does war fighting. We have great credibility. the Middle East has always invested in us. Why are we not creating national solutions that work on the export market, there is hu we're going to be spending a lot more money in defense globally. That seems to me to present an opportunity. So rather than fiddling with a tactical, turning the dials a little bit Let's have a visionary. Wh's the JFK? Where's the person who goes? There's a different future ahead of us. We all need to buy into it. I mean, Rob, is Andy Burnham that man with those eyelashes Well I think it does hark back to this idea of him being someone who is a good storyteller. And I think there is a story to be told, as Sean has outlined there, where you do actually start to talk about defence as part of a kind of broader effort of national renewal almost. So Look warar bonds might be one part of it. another Another focus Randy Burnham, of course, has been talking about re industrialization, especially around the North of England, where he was obviously mayor and where he now represents in Makerfield. And you already have the sort of start of a program anyway, being pushed by the MOD of essentially trying to use defense spending as an engine for growth So essentially trying to of strategically use this money not only to bolster our defences, but also so people on the ground can see the benefit of it and you can feel the economic benefit as a government. So you would expect him to be pursuing that as well you in his book, he talks more about using green energy and green tech as the sort of engine of re industrialization across the North. I wonder whether he expands that to include defence as well Isn't there something more fundamental at play here? I mean, Sean, is there anything in Andy Burnham's political journey that makes you think he gets it, that he understands that the defense of the realm is his first priority in Downing Street? Andy is a consumate politician and a storyteller, and at the moment there isn't the public support, the public recognition When I go to Ukraine, it's really clear when you talk to people, they don't have that choice anymore They want to have a welfare state. they want to have an NHS, they want to have freedoms and freedom of speech. None of that is possible if you can't protect yourself. We don't feel that at the moment. Andy Burnham will know If you were at the start of a premiership, for example, you had five years to run, you'd w an overwhelming majority, you could do all sorts of things, ramp up taxes and actually address this properly, have an absolute furor in the public, but three or four years down the pipe you could start to give money back call me a cynic but we've seen this play before and all of a sudden now, you have actually addressed the real problem at hand. I don't think Andy Burnham's got that luxury this time around. So I think he's a lot more constrained in his options. I think that question, you ask Sean, Do we get a sense that he gets it, that he gets the new world that we're living in? At the moment, it goes back to the very first thing we spoke about on this pod I think the jury' out because Andy Burnham has very little record. a track record to analyze when it comes to this sort of stuff. maybe over the coming weeks before he inevitably, I think now moves into number ten, will get a better idea. But I imagine there is some very, very deep thinking going on and b. know, and I think there' be plenty of people in Labour and not least in the military establishment as well that will be looking for quite a lot of reassurance from Andy Burnham that he does understand that the breadth and the size of the issue that theses about to take on. Seaan, during your time working in the military, working at the Ministry of Defence, did you ever just get sick of them all Did how often did you actively curse your political paymasters So when you join the military, you pledge to serve your queen then, king now and country. But but it isn't the king or the queen that sends you off to war, it's your politicians. And so therefore