Britain in peril
THE Government’s complacency on defence — despite rising global threats — has gone from alarming to borderline terrifying.
Keir Starmer again refuses to set a deadline for spending 2.5 per cent of our GDP on it, let alone the three per cent minimum it actually needs given the parlous state of our forces.
ReutersKeir Starmer again refuses to set a deadline for spending 2.5 per cent of our GDP on defence[/caption]
Yet another Strategic Defence Review must be laboriously completed first — an insane delay given the urgency.
We pray our enemies are also content to wait for us to rearm.
The fact Russia was close to setting off a nuke in Ukraine in 2022 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary John Healey confidently insists that incoming President Trump will stick by both Ukraine and Nato.
Really?
He doesn’t know Trump’s thinking. Trump’s son told President Zelensky at the weekend: “You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.”
It’s not a good sign.
When Trump says parts of Europe don’t pull their weight on defence, relying on US taxpayers instead to fund THEIR protection, he’s dead right.
Britain and other Nato allies must find the funds to stand on our own two feet.
If for us that entails binning ideological Labour spending, better still.
Eco mania
WHY is Keir Starmer at the pointless Cop 29 climate jolly as the world’s biggest polluters stay away?
Leaders of China, India, the US and EU (including coal-fired Germany) are not expected in Azerbaijan.
Our PM, unaccountably, is there.
So is the Taliban, Afghanistan’s repugnant regime which now bans women from uttering a sound outdoors.
Who cares what misogynist Islamist terrorists think about CO2 emissions?
No10 says the UK must return to “a position of global climate leadership”.
What self-important guff.
Other nations don’t want or need our “leadership”.
Wisely, they will be guided by the health of their own economies, climate-sceptic Trump especially.
We should do the same. Britain’s emissions are tiny.
If we somehow ended them overnight it would make no discernable dent in the global total.
We would, however, be bankrupt.
Even Ed Miliband’s pet advisers reckon the Energy Secretary’s 2030 “clean power” fantasy is effectively impossible.
Sir Keir must embrace a new realism. He may need to fire the zealot Miliband.
We’ll cope somehow.
A Sun star
THE Sun’s Jane Moore has handled plenty of snakes, squirming invertebrates and other toxic creatures in her time.
Even if they do identify as politicians, royal flunkies and showbiz egomaniacs.
So we predict she’ll be a natural on I’m A Celeb . . . and a total star.
Best of luck, Jane of the Jungle.