The Plan To Get Britain Ready For War

Newscast

BBC

Politics, News

4.4 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, the Prime Minister says the UK military is moving to “war-fighting readiness”.

The government is setting out the aims of its strategic defence review, or more simply how Britain should get ready for war. Starmer told the BBC that the world has changed and "if you want to deter conflict, then the best way to do that is to prepare for conflict." Adam speaks to Chris, and goes over the details of the plan with co-author Dr Fiona Hill.

Plus, James Waterhouse, the BBC’s Ukraine correspondent, discusses a massive drone attack in Russia.

You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere

New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1 Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Jack Maclaren with Julia Webster and Josh Jenkins. The technical producer was Philip Bull. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:04.7	Hello. Now, some days we are a bit guilty of using jargon in journalism, especially
0:10.3	when we're covering politics. And today, I think, is one of those days, because we keep
0:13.5	talking about this strategic defence review, which sounds like a kind of mere document.
0:18.1	But then you actually read this review into the UK's armed forces
0:21.7	and the assessment of the world that they're going to be fighting in. And you realize, yeah,
0:25.8	calling it a strategic defense review just doesn't even cover quite what a dramatic and big
0:30.4	document this is. So let's just call it what it is, a plan to get the UK ready to fight
0:36.8	a war in the modern era.
0:39.2	And so that's what we're going to focus on in this episode of Newscast.
0:41.8	And we're going to be speaking to one of the authors of that plan,
0:45.3	which the government has signed up to in full today.
0:47.7	So all of that on this episode of Newscast.
0:50.5	Newscast from the BBC.
0:52.9	He has just compared me to the fat controller.
0:55.9	Did I say that?
0:57.3	I can't believe I said that.
0:58.7	Next Wednesday?
0:59.5	This is R for the benefit of Earth.
1:02.1	I'm not personally a huge Sabrina carpenter ham.
1:05.0	I don't think I'm being rude.
1:06.4	I like landscapes.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.