Starmer says it would be ‘big mistake’ to think Ukraine no longer needs military support because peace deal inevitable – as it happened | Politics

• Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has said the Ukraine crisis will not result in the government breaking its manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or employee national insurance. In an interview with Beth Rigby for Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Reeves said:

So we increased taxes at the budget to plug the gaps in the public finances and to make sure we had money for the National Health Service. But we’ve just gone through a massive cost of living crisis for many people. They’re still struggling with that cost of living crisis. So I don’t think it is the right thing to do to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT on working people.

And we made that commitment in our manifesto less than a year ago that we weren’t going to increase those taxes on working people. We’re not going to renege on that commitment.

But the former Tory chancellor George Osborne said Reeves should use the current crisis to “go big”. Speaking on his own podcast, Political Currency, he said the government’s current fiscal situation was “unsustainable” because of the need for higher spending, but the constraints imposed by Labour’s tax pledges and its fiscal rules. He went on:

You should go big in a situation like this, you’ve got the perfect excuse – it’s not just an excuse – it’s actually an explanation, which is, it’s a very unsettling global situation. So you go big, you don’t try and swallow this statement in a couple of weeks into a kind of parliamentary reply to an OBR forecast, and try and pretend it’s not a budget. You say ‘The world’s changed. [We’re in] dramatically more dangerous times. Everyone can see that, and we’ve got to respond.’

More than 100 Labour MPs and peers have called on British financial institutions to class UK defence investments as ethical to boost support for Ukraine, PA Media reports. PA says:

In an open letter, the group called for a “rethink” on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment requirements that often exclude defence firms as “unethical”.

Labour MP Alex Baker co-ordinated the letter addressed to Britain’s banks and fund managers, with signatories including former Royal Navy chief admiral Lord West, former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson and chairman of the Commons defence committee Tan Dhesi.

The group said financial institutions can “do more” to help the UK defence sector support Ukraine’s war effort as well as “rapidly generate the capabilities it needs to defend itself”.

The letter from Labour MPs read: “For the United Kingdom to both support Ukraine in its hour of need and ensure defence of our own nation, we must rethink ESG mechanisms that often wrongly exclude all defence investments as ‘unethical’. There can be no more ethical investment than giving the Ukrainian people every ounce of support that can be mustered by their allies.”

Asked whether No 10 agrees that missiles and fighter jets should count as ethical investments, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “The only ethical issue, the main ethical issue at stake here is that Russia has launched this barbaric invasion of Ukraine and they could end this war today by withdrawing their troops. Our commitment to Ukraine remains unwavering.”

The previous Conservative government also called for defence investment to be classed as ESG.

The Conservatives raised twice as much in donations as Labour at the end of last year, including £250,000 from Michael Ashcroft, Rowena Mason reports.

Despite some Tory donors flirting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and others switching to Labour at the election, the party managed to raise almost £2m in the last three months of 2024 as Kemi Badenoch took over the leadership. Labour raised £1m from donors, at least half of which came from trade unions.

A split has emerged at the top of Reform UK after one of its five MPs accused Nigel Farage of being a control freak with limited interest in policy.

Rupert Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP, spoke out about Farage in an interview during which he also joked about the prospect of replacing Farage as party leader.

Lowe told the Daily Mail:

We have to change from being a protest party led by the Messiah into being a properly structured party with a front bench, which we don’t have.

We have to start behaving as if we are leading and not merely protesting.

Nigel is a messianic figure who is at the core of everything but he has to learn to delegate, as not everything can go through one person.

Lowe also suggested he would not want to continue as a Reform UK MP under Farage’s leadership if the party failed to deliver a proper policy platform before the general election. He said:

We have to start developing policy which is going to change the way we govern.

I’m not going to be by Nigel’s side at the next election unless we have a proper plan to change the way we govern from top to bottom.

We can’t raise the hopes of people who are so frustrated with the way we are governed and then flunk it.

Lowe also joked about a betting company offering odds of 20/1 on his becoming the next prime minister.

I’m barely six months into being an MP and I’m in the betting to be the next prime minister. It’s absolutely staggering. I don’t know where this has come from.

In fact, Lowe is fully aware of where this speculation came from, because in January he received surprise backing from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and now a key figure in the Trump administration. After posting a message on X calling for Farage to be replaced as Reform UK leader (because Farage suggested Musk was wrong to support the far-right extremist Tommy Robinson), Musk said Lowe was someone whose statements “make a lot of sense”.

Farage claims he has now patched up relations with Musk, but the semi-endorsement of Lowe as a replacement leader undermined Farage’s authority.

Farage first became involved in Ukip in the 1990s and in Ukip and in the Brexit party (which turned into Reform UK) there has been a long list of political colleagues who have accused him of being a control freak. In almost all cases, Farage has proved his critics right by marginalising them and consigning them to obscurity.

Asked about Lowe’s comments, Farage told the Telegraph:

It’s difficult to have a front bench with only five MPs, isn’t it? And he’s one of them.

Asked about the claim he could not delegate, he said:

Delegate? I’ve delegated everything.

If we had 30 MPs, we’d have a front bench, but with five, we can’t.

The Conservative party, who have been overtaken by Reform UK in most recent polls, said Lowe’s intervention showed Farage’s party was not serious.

In a statement, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:

This internecine warfare at the top of Reform just goes to show that their MPs are more concerned with their own egos, and advancing their personal ambitions, rather than standing up for the British people.

With one of Farage’s most senior MPs doubting his leadership abilities and admitting that Reform is a protest party with no plan, it is clear that Reform are not serious, and will always put self-interest above our national interest.

The Ministry of Defence has announced that it has agreed a £30m deal to buy advanced attack drones for Ukraine.

In a news release, it says:

The new contracts, totalling nearly £30m and backed by the International Fund for Ukraine, will result in Anduril UK supplying cutting-edge Altius 600m and Altius 700m drones – known as loitering munitions – that are designed to monitor an area before striking targets that enter it.

The defence secretary [John Healey] visited Anduril yesterday, where he spoke with a number of American and British staff. Founded in California, Anduril continues to invest significantly in the UK with a large footprint across the country and plans to rapidly scale, in line with the Government’s commitment to keeping the nation safe while providing highly skilled jobs …

The work with Anduril UK been led by Defence Equipment & Support – the procurement arm of the MOD – on behalf of the UK-administered International Fund for Ukraine (IFU). The fund now stands at more than £1.3bn worth of pledges from 10 other countries, of which the UK has contributed £500m.

Ukraine’s armed forces will take delivery of the drones, launchers and spare parts over the coming months.

Healey is in Washington and he visited Anduril’s HQ in the city yesterday ahead of a meeting later today with Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary.

Keir Starmer has restated his belief that the UK should not choose between an alliance with the US and an alliance with Europe.

In an interview with Sky News, he said:

What matters is lasting peace. For that to happen, it’s very important that we don’t make what I think would be a false choice, between on the one hand working with the United States, on the other hand working with Europe.

We’ve enjoyed peace for 80 years … We’ve done that by working with the US – no two countries work as closely as we do on defence and security and intelligence – but also by working with our European partners.

And that’s why I’m resisting those who are saying – Churchill didn’t make the choice, Attlee didn’t make the choice, but they’re now urging me to make the choice between the US and the Europe. Wrong choice, in my view. We’ve preserved the peace for 80 years by working with both the US and Europe, and now is not the time to break that.

Starmer may have been in thinking in particular of the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who twice in the Commons this week urged Starmer to accept that President Trump is now an unreliable ally on matters related to Russia. Starmer told Davey he did not agree.

(Davey would probably respond to Starmer’s point that Churchill and Attlee never had to deal with a US president like Trump.)

Asked to confirm that he would have preferred President Trump not to suspend military aid to Ukraine, Starmer replied:

My strong view is that we need to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. I’ve been arguing that for many, many months.

Asked why he was not at the EU meeting in Brussels today, Starmer said it was an EU meeting and the UK has left the EU. But he said he was talking to European leaders regularly and that he had a meeting of his own planned for tomorrow.

Richard Tice claims main parties ‘terrified’ of Reform UK in Scotland as he welcomes two Tory councillor defections

Libby Brooks

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, has told reporters in Glasgow this morning that Scottish voters are “sick and tired of getting poorer under the SNP” as he visited a community centre and a fish and chip shop in the city’s east end.

Tice said that an “exciting quantity of 15 to 24 year olds” was supporting the party north of the border with membership numbers now “just under 10,000”.

A week after first minister John Swinney described Reform as “fundamentally racist” as he called on opposition parties to come together to challenge the far right, Tice said this showed the SNP was “so terrified of us that they are having to throw about ridiculous insults and language”.

Tice was in Glasgow to meet two defecting Tory councillors although he struggled to remember their full names at the press call on the pavement outside the Val D’oro chippie.

Tice was pressed on what devolved policies the party would put forward for next year’s Scottish parliament elections but said this would happen “in due course”, with his emphasis currently on “cutting wasteful spending, ending “ludicrous” policies transitioning from North Sea drilling and putting more money in people’s pockets “at the end of the week”.

Although Reform consistently poll lower in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK, Holyrood’s proportional system means they are currently forecast to win up to 12 MSPs, which could place them in a powerful position with a minority government.

Speaking to activists and locals at recent council byelections is seems that Reform’s lack of Scotland-specific focus is not deterring support. While the party is still building its infrastructure north of the border, dislocation from the mainstream is driving some former Tory and Labour voters to Reform despite the fact they have yet to put together a Scotland-focused offer.

Q: What do you envisage the UK’s military support for Ukraine looking like, in the light of the changes in the US?

Starmer says he wants to ensure there is a lasting peace.

And if there is a deal – he says we don’t know if there will be one yet – then countries will have to defend it.

He says the UK will play its part.

But that “has to be done in conjunction with the United States”, he says.

He says he has two other points to make.

First, in the meantime they must put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. It would be a “big mistake” to stop that on the assumption there will be a deal.

In the meantime we need to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position. We don’t know there’s going to be a deal. The fighting is going on, and it’s a big mistake to think, well, all we’ve got to do is wait for a deal.

We’ve got to make sure that if they are fighting on, they’re in the strongest position.

And he says the whole for Europe needs to step up.

He says he hopes that will increase orders for British factories in the defence sector.

Keir Starmer is taking part at a Q&A at a defence factory. He is due to take questions from workers and from the media.

There is a live feed here.

Luke Pollard, the armed forces minister, has said that raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, the new policy announced last week, will be “just the starting gun” in the process of strengthening the armed forces.

Speaking at a conference at Chatham House, he said:

The [2.5%] amount is just the starting gun in a much bigger race to protect Britain’s security.

It is not just defence spending that has failed to keep pace with the impending threat. Defence modernisation has fallen badly behind too.

UK defence remains fundamentally shaped by the risk and the demand of the post-cold war era, where there was no direct threat to our security from a major adversary, nor an imperative to be immediately ready for war, to defend our homeland or to mobilise our defence industry.

And at a time of dizzying progress in military technology, warfare and global geopolitics, standing still meant one thing – that meant rapid obsolescence.”

2.5% is just the start of a much bigger process. The more fundamental challenge is to fully bring our armed forces into the modern era and build a leading, tech-enabled military capable of deterring, fighting and winning through constant innovation at a wartime pace.

We are less than three weeks away from the government’s spring statement (in practice, a mini-budget – not that the Treasury like, or use the term) and today the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have both published reports considering some of the chancellor’s options.

The Resolution Foundation focuss on the plans to reform working-age sickness benefits. It says that freezing these benefits would only save £1bn a year by the end of this parliament, and that cuts could have a big impact on some claimants. It says the government should focus on changing the way these benefits operate, not just reducing eligibility.

The report is here. And in its summary the thinktank says:

One possible route to stemming rising benefit spending is to restrict eligibility for support. The previous government proposed changes to the universal credit work capability assessment (WCA) in Autumn 2023, aiming to reduce incapacity benefit spending. However, its consultation on these changes was ruled unlawful earlier this year.

The report cautions that repeating this approach is risky as it would concentrate all the income losses on a small group of claimants.

The scale of losses faced by newly ineligible incapacity benefit claimants is due to the large gap between basic and health-related support in universal credit (UC). For a single adult, basic support of just £393 a month more than doubles to £810 a month if they are eligible for health-related support. This creates a strong incentive to claim the latter.

The government should look to close this gap by redistributing levels of health-related support into basic awards. If the government is committed to making cuts in the short term, it could reduce the gap by freezing health-related support in cash terms between 2025-26 and 2029-30, saving £1bn a year by the end of the parliament.

The report notes that an often-forgotten driver of rising spending, where there is ample room for improvement, is the terrible record of people moving off incapacity and disability benefits.

In its report the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the chancellor may cut spending or put up taxes in the spring statement if she is breaking her fiscal rules. But it also suggests that these rules could be improved.

While there is no such thing as an optimal fiscal framework, it is hard to believe that the UK’s could not be improved. In an uncertain and volatile world, aiming to meet pass–fail fiscal rules with close to zero headroom leaves fiscal policy entirely exposed to global economic developments (or, more accurately, what the OBR judges the impact of those economic developments might be) and puts the chancellor’s (sensible) promise to make fiscal policy changes only once a year at risk. If there is a material change then policy should of course adjust. But the twice-yearly fine-tuning of policy in response to immaterial forecast revisions is an increasingly costly distraction from the big issues.

The Green party has urged the Sentencing Council to stick to its new guidance saying judges should normally get pre-sentence reports for some categories of offenders. (See 9.46am.) The government and the opposition are both saying the guidelines should be withdrawn. But Siân Berry, the Green party MP, said:

Failure to implement these changes would be a serious mistake, causing genuine harm to women, families and young people for whom these new recommendations will create much safer sentencing.

Contrary to reporting, nowhere does the guidance focus primarily on ethnicity. Instead, the guidance, based on strong evidence, helps improve sentencing of women, including pregnant women and parents, and young adults, for whom custodial sentences do huge amounts of harm including to their loved ones and wider society.

Ethnicity and other protected characteristics are mentioned simply so that judges are reminded to consider unconscious bias and that the personal circumstances of offenders may be different than assumed. Bowing to the opposition’s ridiculous accusation of ‘two tier justice’ clearly serves to divide people when we all want to build a genuinely fair and effective justice system.