Isabel Hardman's Sunday Roundup - 01/06/2025
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Isabel Hardman presents highlights from Sunday morning’s political shows.
Defence Secretary John Healey says the nature of war is changing, and admits Britain has an army retention crisis. Elsewhere, Robert Jenrick wants to arm prison officers, and Zia Yusuf talks up Reform’s plan to cut £350bn in public spending.
Produced by Joe Bedell-Brill.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman, |
| 0:14.7 | and this is the Sunday Roundup. Defence Secretary John Healy was interviewed today ahead of the |
| 0:20.6 | government's publication of the Strategic Defence Review, |
| 0:23.4 | which will warn that new technology is significantly changing the nature of war. |
| 0:27.9 | On the BBC, Healy told Laura Coonsberg that Russia is already attacking the UK on a daily basis. |
| 0:34.0 | Do you actually expect that Russia is going to try to attack the UK? |
| 0:38.3 | Russia is attacking the UK daily as part of 90,000 attacks we get that are linked to different states on our defence system in cyberspace. |
| 0:51.3 | It's one of the reasons that we're acting already and we're putting an extra billion in to create a new cyber command and to link our armed forces with the |
| 0:59.6 | digital connections that make them more effective in the future. So we're in a world that is |
| 1:05.0 | changing now. We've got to respond and it is a world of growing threats. It's growing Russian |
| 1:10.4 | aggression. It's those daily cyber attacks. It's new nuclear risks. And it is a world of growing threats. It's growing Russian aggression. It's those daily cyber attacks. |
| 1:13.0 | It's new nuclear risks. And it's increasing tension in other parts of the world as well. And so the |
| 1:17.8 | SDR, the Strategic Defence Review we published tomorrow, will set out a vision for how our forces |
| 1:23.4 | must respond, but how we can keep the British people safer as well. |
| 1:26.7 | Healy also told Kuhnsberg that the army has a retention crisis |
| 1:30.3 | and admitted that its target of 73,000 troops would not be met until the next Parliament. |
| 1:36.3 | Everyone knows that the army has been depleted, |
| 1:38.3 | been real challenges with getting people to join and then stay in the forces. |
| 1:42.3 | Your target is 73,000, but the number's gone down since the |
| 1:46.5 | election. So when do you think you'll hit the target of 73,000 people in the army? |
| 1:50.4 | You're right. A 15 years of a recruitment of retention crisis in our forces, last government |
| 1:57.1 | set and missed targets every year in every service for those 14 years. So when do you think you'll hit your target? |
... |
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