Ex defence secretary slams Starmer's strategy
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Criticism of Labour's response to the global threat, Trump's AI Jesus and parliament's "summer of sex".
Will Dunn and Anoosh Chakelian round up this week's stories.
Any suggestions for next week's categories, please comment below.
📚 READ: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/the-sketch/2026/04/at-a-defence-conference-tech-execs-haggle-over-reducing-the-cost-to-kill
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Anoushekelian and you're listening to Politics from the New Statesman. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm here with my colleague Will Dunn for our weekly roundup. |
| 0:12.0 | Hi Will. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello. |
| 0:14.0 | Our first category this week is in defence of defence of the week. |
| 0:18.0 | Let's begin with Lord George Robertson. |
| 0:21.4 | He is an ex-defense secretary, Labor Defence Secretary. |
| 0:25.0 | He also was head of NATO, and he did the government's strategic defence review. |
| 0:31.5 | And he's just basically been unleashed this week and said everything that he thinks and ripped in it. |
| 0:37.2 | Yeah, if you will. Let's listen to what he said. |
| 0:40.3 | There is a corrosive complacency today in Britain's political leadership. |
| 0:46.3 | Lib service is paid to the risks, the threats, the bright red signals of danger, |
| 0:53.3 | but even the promised national conversation |
| 0:57.4 | about defence can't be started. |
| 1:01.2 | And this is a big deal because he is the guy that Kirstama decided, you go and work out |
| 1:06.0 | how we do our defence and then we will come up with a spending plan for how to make that a reality |
| 1:12.6 | and that's that would be in the defence investment plan which was due to be published last autumn |
| 1:16.8 | it's still not out apparently they're still waiting on the prime minister's sign off on it |
| 1:21.4 | and that's what's made Robertson so frustrated yeah and it's interesting to me that he has also been talking about this in wider fiscal terms. |
| 1:31.3 | So he isn't just talking within his remit of saying we need to spend a lot of money on defence. |
| 1:39.3 | He also said Britain's welfare budget is now five times the amount we spend on defence. |
... |
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