Labour blasts Trump VP choose JD Vance over ‘Islamist state’ nukes jibe
Labour has accused Donald Trump‘s pick for vice president of presenting a ‘caricature’ of Britain after an astonishing outburst claiming the UK would be the first ‘truly Islamist’ state with nuclear weapons.
Defence Secretary John Healey hit out at Ohio senator JD Vance, who was chosen as Mr Trump’s running mate on Monday night, over comments in an address to the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC last week.
Saying he had to ‘beat up on the UK’, he told the conference he had been discussing with a friend which would be ‘the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon’.
He said: ‘We were like maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan kind of counts, and then we sort of decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour just took over.
‘But to my Tory friends, I have to say, you guys have got to get a handle on this.’
But both Labour and Tory figures criticised the comments, with former Conservative minister Andrew Bowie calling them ‘offensive’.
Mr Healey told Sky News: ‘I don’t think anyone here in Britain would recognise that caricature here.’
Defence Secretary John Healey hit out at Ohio senator JD Vance, who was chosen as Mr Trump’s running mate on Monday night, over comments in an address to the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC last week.
Saying he had to ‘beat up on the UK’, he told the conference he had been discussing with a friend which would be ‘the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon’.
Mr Vance said: ‘We were like maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan kind of counts, and then we sort of decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour just took over. ‘But to my Tory friends, I have to say, you guys have got to get a handle on this.’
Pushed on whether it was offensive, Mr Healey replied: ‘Well, politics is controversial. You know, President Trump is controversial. It should be no surprise he’s picked somebody who’s also controversial as a running mate.
‘But, in the end, who the American people elect to be their president and vice-president is for them.’
Mr Healey said there had always been a ‘very close alliance’ between the UK and US.
The Labour government would ‘work with whoever the American people elect as their leaders’, he stressed.
‘This strong relationship at the heart of NATO… has seen through some ups and downs of political cycles on both sides of the Atlantic before,’ he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner yesterday described the remarks from Mr Vance as ‘fruity’, adding that she did not ‘recognise that characterisation’.
Bowie, the shadow veterans minister, said he ‘absolutely’ disagreed with the claim that Labour was creating an ‘Islamist country’.
He told Times Radio: ‘I disagree with the Labour Party fundamentally on many issues, but I do not agree with that view, quite frankly. I think it’s actually quite offensive, frankly, to my colleagues in the Labour Party.’
Despite Mr Vance’s comments about Labour, Foreign Secretary David Lammy is reported to have good relations with the senator, has met him multiple times and praised his memoir, Hillybilly Elegy, saying it ‘reduced me to tears’.
In an address to the Hudson Institute in Washington in May, Mr Lammy described Mr Vance as his ‘friend’, saying he was ‘right to say we in Europe have a problem that we need to fix with higher defence expenditure’.
But the selection of Mr Vance, a former US marine who previously opposed Mr Trump, could still pose a challenge for the new Labour Government if Mr Trump returns to the White House.
As well as his comments about the UK and Labour, Mr Vance has backed attempts by the US Republican Party to end support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
In the same speech at the National Conservatism conference, he criticised the decision to send Ukraine ‘hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry with no obvious end in sight and no obvious conclusion or even objective that we are close to getting accomplished’.
Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chairwoman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said Mr Vance’s selection ‘only cements the need’ for the Government to set out a firm timetable for spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, rising to 3%.
She said: ‘Old certainties can no longer be taken for granted and firm action is needed to ensure our own, and European, security.’
However Reform UK leader and Clacton MP Nigel Farage said that Mr Vance was a ‘full-on Conservative’, adding: ‘He was talking to a conservative conference, and he was a bit tongue in cheek in what he said. But it raises quite a big fundamental question.’
