Former Defence Secretary Dame Penny Mordaunt has told GB News that Labour's defence spending plans are a "mess", following Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's latest pledge.Ahead of the annual Nato Summit in The Hague, the Labour leader has pledged to meet the new target of five per cent of UK GDP on defence by 2035.FULL STORY HERE.
00:00Now, the broader context, of course, is this NATO summit today. The Prime Minister is due to tell us all that he does want to reach 5% of GDP in terms of defence spending.
00:12He wants to spend that amount by 2035. That would be apparently an increase of £40 billion every single year. Are you supportive of that target?
00:22Well, I would love that. But as you know, it's not funded. I mean, if Puff the Magic Dragon held a cigar party in the Palace of Versailles, you couldn't have any more smoke and mirrors than the Treasury has deployed today.
00:38Leave aside the 1.5, which is spent on things which aren't really defence but support our security, which could include road infrastructure, for example.
00:47What we're talking about is trying to meet the NATO new floor of 3.5% in the next Parliament. That's what NATO says we need to do as a minimum.
01:00And unless you've got a plan to fund that, it doesn't matter what your ambitions are. And that's important, not just because you need that credibility.
01:09You also need to send a signal to industry. You're going to make that investment so it can gear up. And you need to also send a signal which will enable nations to be smarter about their procurement and make the efficiency savings that are already baked in to the MOD's budget.
01:29And I'm afraid at the spending review, there was no uplift to defence spending at all. We've still got big questions about how this disastrous Chagos Islands deal is going to be funded and even which department the budget is going to come from.
01:46And there's all sorts of questions around the ambition on savings that the department will make. So it's a mess. This is what Labour always does.
01:55When we came in 2010, the black hole in the defence budget was twice the size of the defence budget, £71 billion on Roussi's figures.
02:04It's because it talks the talk, but it does not put its money where its mouth is.
