Starmer on defence: ‘That’s what you’d expect from a serious government’

We sit down with Prime Minister Keir Starmer to talk about his commitment of 2.5% of GDP on defence and tackling the crisis in UK prisons.

Gary Gibbon: You’ve been talking about the 2.5 per cent of GDP you want spent on defence at some future point. There’s some puzzlement back home about how if you’re going to have a review, and then work out the date you’re going to hit it, and yet you’re going to have a spending review before that. So you’re going to decide the envelope, and yet somehow you’re going to stretch the envelope a bit later. It doesn’t quite tally.

Keir Starmer: The commitment to 2.5 per cent is absolute. And we will get to that 2.5 per cent. It is very important. We need to do that within our fiscal rules. I think that actually underscores the seriousness of what we’re doing. If I was to sit here and say to you, ‘We’re going to hit 2.5 per cent, I’m going to pick an arbitrary date, I’m not going to tell you how we’re going to afford it’, you would say that’s an unserious plan.

Gary Gibbon: But it seems unserious if you’re going into a spending review and deciding the entire cash envelope and you haven’t worked out when you’re intending to hit the 2.5. There won’t be enough money for defence, so you’ll have to scrape it out of something else you don’t want to scrape it out of.

Keir Starmer: We’ll meet it within our fiscal rules. Obviously we will go through that exercise. There is the strategic review as well, which is looking at the risks and the capabilities…

Gary Gibbon: But they’re out of kilter, these two things, are they not?

Keir Starmer: We’ve now got access to material that we, understandably and rightly, didn’t have access to before we were in government. So we’ll carry out that strategic review. The commitment to 2.5 per cent is the commitment. It’s the commitment that we have made as a government, that I have made. But we need a clear pathway to it. That is what you would expect from a serious government.

Gary Gibbon: You get my point, these things are not tied up properly. But can I ask you about, you say you’re now getting to seriously see the books and that sort of thing. We had Rachel Reeves on Monday, some people say sort of pearl-clutching horror at what the books looked like. But through the general election, we could all hear, Institute for Fiscal Studies, almost any economist you talk to, saying what the problem was with the books. You’ve got the OBR telling you on a regular basis what the books look like. There’s something sort of performative, slightly contrived, about this, because that’s what it looks like.

Keir Starmer: Let me absolutely meet that head on. If you take one issue that’s come up urgently, that’s prisons, then I’m afraid what we found is much worse than what I was expecting. I’m deeply familiar…

Gary Gibbon: Is that right, I mean yet again…

Keir Starmer: I can tell you it’s right…

Gary Gibbon: The Prison Governors’ Association has put out a statement saying they told you what it was like. You had loads of talks beforehand, you knew it was bad.

Keir Starmer: It is far worse, it’s far worse. It is shocking. Obviously, I know this field pretty well, but it is a basic function of government to make sure that we have the prison places we need for those people who are being sent to prison by our courts. For that to have broken down is a catastrophic failure of the last government. It is a very high level of recklessness and irresponsibility. And I would say this is not a party political issue. It’s a basic function of government. And it’s worse than we thought it would be.

Gary Gibbon: You’ve appointed James Timpson as prisons minister, and that makes people think yet again, that the stuff that you were saying in the election about clamping down on crime and all the rest of it, you’re doing the familiar rhetoric, the tough talk. But James Timpson is someone who believes that about a third of the people, particularly women, who are in prison, shouldn’t be there. There should be much more community sentencing, a sort of whole rethink of prisons, which you didn’t talk about in the election. You just talked about building more prisons. Is that actually where you are? Are you much closer to James Timpson’s thinking?

Keir Starmer: I spent five years of my life as the chief prosecutor, bringing cases which led to serious criminals going to prison for very long periods of time, and quite right to…

Gary Gibbon: I’m asking about the others though.

Keir Starmer: In relation to the work that could be done to prevent people going to prison, I’ve always believed that there are cases which didn’t need to have got to court. So if you look at some of the stuff we were saying in the election about knife crime and tackling crime that’s particularly prevalent among young people, we want youth hubs, which are an opportunity to pull young people out of that life.

Gary Gibbon: Absolutely, and that was in the manifesto. But what wasn’t in the manifesto was a lot more community sentencing, many fewer people going into prisons. It sounded like you were going to send more to prison. You wanted to build more prisons. Is it actually that you think there are too many people who get prison sentences who shouldn’t get them? Maybe particularly women?

Keir Starmer: We’re not conducting a review of sentencing. We’re dealing with an immediate problem…

Gary Gibbon: So what’s James Timpson doing there? He’s got all these beliefs.

Keir Starmer: We’re dealing with an immediate problem, which is that we’ve got too many prisoners for the prison places that we’ve got. That is a complete failure of the last government, we need to address that.

Gary Gibbon: I’m being told my time is up. No rethink on sentencing?

Keir Starmer: We will look at sentencing in the round, but the problem I’m addressing this week is not sentencing.

Gary Gibbon: Sounds like there might be a rethink of that.

Keir Starmer: I’m not addressing the question of sentencing policy. I’m addressing something much more basic. Which is that this government has left a complete mess when it comes to prisons, and we are going to have to pick that up. We’re going to have to fix it, and yes, then we’re going to have to look at what the long-term fix of that is. But the immediate problem they’ve left us is a very serious problem of too many prisoners for the number of prison places. And I can’t build a prison overnight, as is obvious.