Kemi Badenoch has accused the government of prioritising ‘benefits over bullets’ and said it is a ‘national scandal’ that plans on how they will raise money for defence have still not been published.
In a hard-hitting speech today on the urgent need for more defence spending, the Conservative leader said that the government was ‘woefully unprepared’ to defend the UK and had ‘no plan’ to defend Britain and war in the Gulf ‘must act as a wake-up call’.
‘We have grown fat on welfare, prioritising benefits over bullets. Britain has overspent the peace dividend that followed the Cold War and politicians of all colours as well as the electorate, prioritised day-to-day concerns over defence.’
Ms Badenoch said that US President Donald Trump was right to say that the UK and Europe was spending too much money on welfare instead of defence with the UK now spending ‘£1 in every £3 on welfare’.
‘Instead of subsidising the defence of Europe, we built welfare systems instead.
‘They ignored evidence that this era of peace would not go on forever. They looked away from Georgia, Crimea, hoping they were anomalies then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That was the moment we couldn’t ignore.’
Calling for the ‘biggest peacetime programme of rearmament in our history’, she said the government’s spending plans to enact its Strategic Defence Review ‘promised last autumn’ were still nowhere to be seen.
‘It was promised last autumn and now we are hearing that it won’t be published until next autumn. This is national scandal.’
In a speech at the London Defence Conference, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pledges ‘the largest net increase in British troops under any government since the Second World War’ if the Tories return to power
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the stands during a Premier League match at Emirates Stadium
Dismissing Defence Secretary John Healey’s comments yesterday that we are ready to defence ourselves, she said:
‘I am not here to lie to you. We are not ready. At a time of war in Europe and a time of war in the Middle East and at a time when these conflicts are affecting every family across Britain, at a time when Britain’s place in the world is in flux, our government literally does not have a plan.
‘There is no plan for how the government is going to buy equipment, weapons and munitions. There is no plan for how to enact the Strategic Defence Review. There is no plan for rearming Britain. I asked Keir Starmer about this at Prime Minister’s Questions and he put his head in his hands.
‘The reason there is no plan is because they have no idea how they are going to pay for it so it is time to make some tough choices. The question is not whether Britain should re-arm but it is what choices we must make to do so.’
She also warned the UK ‘a once proud nation used to stamping its influence on the world’ had displayed its ‘shocking lack of readiness’ in its response to the Iran war and even had to rely on the French bailing us out.
And in her keynote speech to the London Defence Conference Ms Badenoch also welcomed the news that the government has been forced to shelve the deal to give away the Chagos Islands without US backing.
She said the Prime Minister’s Chagos deal was ‘in the dustheap where it belongs’ and said that Sir Keir Starmer had been ‘astonishingly naïve’ to plan to give away the strategic Indian Ocean island archipelago to Mauritius, a country ‘in the orbit of China’.
Her comments came after it was reported that the government’s controversial plans to give away the sovereign territory and lease back the land for the key US-UK military base at Diego Garcia for an estimated £101 million a year have been abandoned.
They were forced to drop them after they apparently ran out of time to enact the required legislation in this Parliament because US President Donald Trump withdrew his support for the deal after calling it ‘an act of total weakness’.
Ms Badenoch said the deal would also have meant that the US would need us even less, commenting:
‘The Labour government’s obsession with ‘lawfare’ is summed up by their Chagos deal – the site of a vital US-UK defence base they are giving away to a country in the orbit of China and paying billions of pounds to do so.
‘This is astonishingly naïve. It is romantic fiction to believe that countries will judge us based on how nice we are.
‘They will judge us on what we bring to the table and what leverage we bring and what power we can protect and enforce. How much does out value to the US decrease if we give the Chagos Islands away? How much less do they need us and how much more do we need them?’
She added: ‘So I welcome the news that the Chagos surrender might finally be on the dustheap where it belongs. This latest surrender underscores yet again the value of Conservatives in opposition fighting for what we believe in until the government changes its mind.’
She also agreed Donald Trump was right to question European readiness and ‘right to hold a mirror up’.
Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey (pictured) delivers a statement on recent British operational activity, during which he said that Britain and allies monitored a Russian attack submarine and two spy submarines in the North Atlantic for a month before they retreated
But while she insisted a strong alliance with the US was crucial to the UK and Europe, she criticised the President saying he was ‘wrong to insult our army and navy’ and make ‘childish remarks about the Prime Minister’ and suggested ‘close allies should disagree in private’ not in public where enemies like Iran, China and Russia would be listening and taking delight in it.
Claiming that without the Conservative response to Ukraine when the party ‘led the world in convening support for Ukraine’ Kyiv could ‘very well be under Russian control’ she said it was not enough to have found money to increase defence spending.
And she admitted the last Conservative government did not do enough to rebuild the ‘resilience and the readiness’ that ‘a more dangerous world required’.
But she said the Labour government was not just unprepared ‘militarily with no Royal Navy warships in the Middle East for the first time in decades’ but also ‘strategically unprepared too’ because it was too busy looking ‘inward instead out of outward’ and fighting within its own ranks.
Ms Badenoch said the UK government was warned about US Israeli strikes in advance and it ‘was obvious’ in the event of any conflict that ‘our bases and our allies would be targeted’ but ‘just before the conflict began our only active minesweeper was taken out of the Gulf, our only active destroyer was stuck in Portsmouth’.
She said: ‘We seemingly had no plan to protect our citizens in the region. Britain looked taken by surprise and woefully unprepared while our allies in France and in Greece mobilised quickly and it happened because we have a government that was politically unprepared for this war, distracted by its own infighting and psychodrama, too busy scratching itches from the opposition about the two child benefit cap, about taxing private schools to notice what was coming.
‘They have now spent more time reversing their own decisions than preparing for this war, looking inward instead outward.
‘I am not a military expert but I do understand the nature of power. Power does not come from wishful thinking, power does not come from speeches about values if those values are not defended by hard capability.’
Ms Badenoch pledged that any Conservative government would reinstate the two child benefit cap and spend the £3 billion saved on defence ‘to fund the largest net increase in British troops under any government since the Second World War’ recruiting 6,000 regular soldiers and 14,000 reservists.
She also vowed to take £17bn from sources including Ed Miliband’s ‘disastrous Net Zero projects’ to create a new sovereign defence fund to ‘invest in British defence start ups, protect our supply chains and deliver drone technology right across our armed forces’.
‘My priority is to keep British families safe and this will require tough decisions.’
She also called on Keir Starmer to ‘put party interests aside’ and said that ‘re-arming Britain cannot wait until the next conservative government’ and pledged to support any cross party plan ‘putting party interests aside’ to boost defence spending with a three-line whip to her MPs.
‘The war in the Gulf must act as a wake-up call not for navel gazing or finger pointing about who did what but for action. Let’s start by urgently deploying the resources we do have to serve our national interest in this conflict. We must show our allies and our enemies that we are willing to get out hands dirty,’ she said.
Writing exclusively for the Daily Mail today, Ms Badenoch also warned of the ‘collapse of consequences in British life’ as evidenced by large-scale looting by teenage gangs in London, the ‘explosion in welfare dependency’ and the ‘tide of small-boat arrivals that mock our border controls on a daily basis’
She warned that this behaviour in other countries would be clamped down on, ‘we are building a culture in which people think they can do whatever they like – and that nothing will happen in response’.
‘We appear to have forgotten the simple truth that more people will commit crimes if they believe they can get away with it,’ she said.
She also blamed the country’s ‘increasing addiction to ‘welfareism’ as ‘another another facet of the same problem’.
And she warned that the only way to tackle the wave of social problems we were seeing was ‘to bring consequences back’.
She said: ‘If welfare pays more than work, people will drift out of the labour market. And that across society, if the rules are not enforced, they will not be followed.’