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John Ivison: Let Starmer’s defence-spending implosion be a warning to Carney

The lesson is the welfare-vs-warfare debate is an irrelevancy and western societies need to be more resilient in an age of rising threats

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Al Carns, the 24-year Royal Marine veteran turned British politician, posted a Facebook video over the weekend, two days after he resigned as the U.K.’s armed forces minister.

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Carns followed his boss, defence minister John Healey, out of the door, with both claiming that the Labour government’s defence funding plan was inadequate.

John Ivison: Let Starmer’s defence-spending implosion be a warning to Carney Back to video

Carns said it had become clear to him that the change he pushed for in defence spending was not going to come. “We are still purchasing capability suitable for the last war, while our adversaries arm for the next one,” he said.

The resignations (which also included two MPs resigning as defence parliamentary secretaries) are over the not-yet-released U.K. government’s Defence Investment Plan, which will fall short of the goal of three per cent of GDP defence spending by 2030. The plan is not transformative enough, or sufficiently funded, Carns and Healey said — particularly in light of Prime Minister Keir........

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