The Prime Minister must let us know where he stands on defence and security - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: MK O'Sullivan, Victoria Street, Allerton Bywater, Castleford.
Last week I watched PMQ's, which I seldom do, one crowd of braying donkeys shouting at another crowd of braying donkeys, and grossly overpaid for doing so.
Kemi Badenoch rips into Keir Starmer on defence and security and the delay in publishing the long awaited DIP (Defence Investment Plan), tells us what the Tory party would do. Does this woman take us all for fools? Clearly she does. Does she imagine that voters will dismiss the 14 years and the cuts and more cuts to the defence budget?
Does she think we will forget how her party slashed the size of the armed forces, cancelled orders for new equipment, to build new destroyers and frigates and sold off ships badly needed now?
Watching the current shadow defence minister James Cartlidge, I am reminded of the rabbit caught in the lights of a coming car at night. Voters in Yorkshire when a Tory MP seeks your vote ask him/her about defence and Tory slashing, it will be a brief conversation. He/she will vanish.
Keir Starmer has to decide soon where the extra funding for defence will come from. He knows that among his backbench MPs there is little or no appetite for defence extra funding if welfare cuts are part of the price so tax rises must be considered.
Keir Starmer, if he looks around Europe and NATO, will see that those alliance members most distant from the Russian border are very reluctant to find extra money for defence and security, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece come to mind.
In Germany the AfD party members and supporters would most likely join with Russia in any attack on a NATO member state, say one of the Baltic states.
The Prime Minister has let us know where he stands on defence and security. And where does Andy Burnham stand?