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[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

THE FIVE TESTS

For weeks I've argued that this party, and this country, needs a proper debate about where we go next. Not a reshuffle. Not a few degrees of course correction. The big, difficult, honest choices we've spent thirty years avoiding.

A few people have asked me what that debate should actually be about. Fair enough. I spent 24 years in the Marines and two in government, and I resigned because I couldn't win the argument I believed in from the inside. So let me make it here, plainly.

This isn't a manifesto, but a set of five tests. Anyone asking to lead our country should be able to look down this list and say yes to all five.

1️⃣ ⁠The Frontline Test
Do we give the people on the frontline the kit they need to do the job, and stand by them when the job is done?

I joined the Marines at 18. I've buried friends. So I do take this one personally.

I sat in government and watched us write a defence plan for a world that no longer exists, discussed in rooms I was kept out of. A 100k drone is now sinking warships that cost a billion. That is the reality of the wars being fought right now.

Passing this means 3% of GDP as the floor, not the ceiling. Buying for the next war, not the last. And fixing the Legacy Act so blokes in their seventies aren't back in the dock for what they were cleared of decades ago.

2️⃣ The Next-Generation Test
Are we handing the next generation a better deal than the one we inherited, or a worse one?

I'm a lad from a tough part of Aberdeen. My mum raised five of us through some bleak years. The only reason I got out was because I was given an opportunity. That cannot be said for young people today.

Nearly a million young people, around one in eight, are now outside work, education or training. That isn't their failure. It's ours.

Fixing this means a NEETs and youth unemployment target with a date, the youth guarantee delivered not just announced. Restoring the link between work and a decent life for the under 30s, on housing, wages and opportunity. Skills and apprenticeship numbers that beat the last government, not just match it.

Talent is everywhere in this country. Opportunity isn't. Fix that and you fix half of everything else...

3️⃣ ⁠The Trillion-Pound Test
Is the plan to add a trillion pounds to what Britain earns, or to manage the decline more politely?

Here's the lesson I learned from Ukraine and in government, and it never changes. We invent things. Other countries build them. Other countries decide. We're brilliant at the first mile and absent for the next ninety nine.

So set a target and be judged on it. A trillion pounds added to our GDP within a decade. Yes, it's ambitious. We should be ambitious!

Getting there means backing the high tech inventors just as much as the high street traders. Your local coffee shop shouldn't be paying more tax per cappuccino than Starbucks does. So why on earth do they?

It means an industrial strategy worth the name. Things to make and things to sell, in Barrow, in Derby, in every region. Our industrial base is national security, so we should fund it like it.

And it means building the chips and the compute here, not inventing the breakthrough and watching someone else scale it. Data is the new gunpowder.

4️⃣ The 10% Test
Can we make the country work 10% better, instead of only ever asking for 10% more?

I saw this from the inside. We patch the symptom this year, but the bill grows next year, and we end up paying for failure at the most expensive end of every system.

A 10% improvement in outcomes across a handful of our biggest problems, ill health, reoffending, wasted potential, would free up somewhere between £40 and £60 billion a year. We're already paying those costs. We just pay them too late, when they're at their worst.

Passing this means investing early instead of paying far more later, and having the honesty to admit that not every pound we spend today delivers an immediate return.

5️⃣ ⁠The Lights-On Test
Does our energy policy keep the lights on, the bills down and factories open, or do we keep chasing a target and hope the rest sorts itself out?

For years we've treated net zero as the only goal, and everything else, your bill, our industry, whether the grid even stays up, as a problem for later. That’s the wrong way around.

Make energy security the goal. Power that people, businesses, and industry can afford, and a grid that stays on when someone tries to switch it off. Do that and net zero follows. Chase the target on its own, and you end up with neither.

Passing this means a serious baseload, nuclear and the North Sea, built in time to matter. Strong countries have cheap, secure energy. Weak countries don't.

None of this is complicated. It's the oldest deal there is. You serve the country, the country stands by you. In uniform, in a hospital, in a classroom, on a building site. Right now that deal is broken, and everyone keeping our country going can feel it.

That broken deal is the real reason for the frustration out there. It's why trust has drained out of politics. And it's why our party that won a landslide is, halfway through the term, already arguing about who leads it.

But changing the person at the top fixes nothing if we don't fix the deal underneath. Swap one leader for another and leave the deal broken, and we'll be right back here in eighteen months, asking the same question all over again.

So I'm not interested in who gets what job. I'm interested in whether we've got the courage to pass these tests.

We've been promised a debate. This is my opening offer to it. And if that debate ever becomes a contest, it should be fought on this ground, not on personalities.

I know where I stand.

[Robert Clark @RobertClark87]

"You either have the ships to send to the Gulf or the brigades to deploy to Ukraine, or you don’t.”

Extraordinary broadside from Poland's Foreign Minister. We had one ship to send to the Gulf (late) & we don't have a brigade to send to Ukraine. The underfudned, unchanged DIP will not change this.

Poland tells Britain: Pay up or risk global irrelevance https://t.co/oEabTBGFIM

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham’s train has arrived in London 21 minutes late

He can now claim Delay Repay from Avanti West Coast

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

Keir Starmer's successor, whoever that will be, will fail just like he did.

The United Kingdom is ungovernable at this point because the elected government no longer controls the state apparatus. The unholy blob that Tony Blair constructed runs everything, and they answer to no one. Starmer himself literally said that he pulls a lever and nothing happens. His replacement will find those levers still do nothing.

Without a massive purge of the NGOs, the Quangos, the courts, the civil service, and the administrative state, changing Prime Ministers will do about as much good as swapping out a kid's steering-wheel toy in a car that's hurdling off a cliff.

[Dominic Hauschild @domhauschild]

The head of the armed forces Sir Richard Knighton has just revealed something shocking about the defence budget💥

He said during a House of Lords committee meeting that the armed forces would have to "dial back" its work if he doesn't get any more money.

He was responding to a series of questions from Lord Robertson, who asked whether the reported £10bn spending uplift offered to John Healey - prompting his resignation - was enough.

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

My resignation speech to the @HouseofCommons today ⬇️

[Lucy Fisher @LOS_Fisher]

Hard hitting resignation speech by John Healey in the Commons, with a parting shot at the Chancellor

‘Our adversaries don’t follow timetables set by the Treasury,’ he told MPs

‘This is the age of hard power and rising threat, this is not the moment for calibration or incremental change. That means bigger politics, bolder priorities, harder choices,’ he said

He repeated his call for Britain to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

@TiceRichard you’ve got a border force for that. People dont join the armed forces to become some pathetic MAGA ICE walter mitty crowd.

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

This week the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. British researchers were studying it. British companies were testing it. British hospitals were piloting it. Not any more.

This isn't an AI story. It's the story of every industry we used to lead.

Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. DeepMind was built here. Our AI Safety Institute writes the rules other countries follow. We have the researchers, the universities, the standards.

What we don't have is the power stations to run the data centres, the planning system to build them, or the industrial base to make the chips. So the work happens here and the value lands somewhere else. We invent. Others build. Others decide. Then we read about it on Saturday morning.

Same story as the kit our soldiers don't have. Same story as the factories we used to.

I spent nine months in government making this argument inside the room. I'll make it louder from outside.

[The Mercian @TheMercianNews]

🚨 BREAKING: Former Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has slammed the Labour party's witch-hunts against British veterans who fought in Northern Ireland.

"Who is this playing to? It is playing to Republican Sinn Fein. They lost the war through physical means and now they're trying to achieve it through political means. I don't want to see anybody rewrite history to see Britain as in the wrong. We were in the right."

[Steven Swinford @Steven_Swinford]

EXCLUSIVE from @oliver_wright

Keir Starmer was blindsided by John Healey's resignation as defence secretary because he was far more worried about Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves

Miliband was on “resignation watch” after he refused repeatedly to meet Starmer to discuss planned cuts to his net zero agenda. The fear was that the energy secretary would use the announcement to quit and publicly throw his weight behind Burnham

Extraordinarily No 10 was also worried about Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who had been strongly arguing for a much smaller defence uplift of “single figure billions”

Reeves was said to be so angry about the move to take money from other departments’ spending plans to top up defence that she had refused to take part in the process of drawing up the cuts

While her allies said Reeves had worked “constructively” on trying to find the money, tellingly it was No 10, rather than the Treasury, that negotiated cuts to infrastructure budgets.

“It went well beyond what Rachel wanted,” said one No 10 source. “John [Healey] knew how difficult it was and how hard the prime minister worked to get it up to £13.5 billion.”

Our weekend read on how John Healey’s resignation blew a hole in Keir Starmer’s survival strategy:

Healey’s resignation is deeply damaging for two reasons. First, until now, Healey has been as loyal as they come, resolutely defending the prime minister time and again on the broadcast rounds

But far worse was the timing. Starmer’s whole survival strategy was predicated on playing up his national security credentials. The plan had been to launch Dip before next week’s G7 summit at Evian in France and use the event to present Starmer as the man who could take the “big decisions to make the country safe”

It was deliberately designed to contrast Starmer with the inexperienced mayor of Greater Manchester, giving Burnham and Labour MPs at least a few second thoughts about an immediate challenge

Instead the prime minister heads to Evian with that entire strategy in tatters and a date with President Trump that could be excruciating

“The survival plan has been totally demolished by Healey,” a senior Labour figure said. “Starmer’s strongest card was as the man who can take the big decisions to keep the country safe and Healey has accused him of putting the country at risk. It is hard to see how we go from here.”

https://t.co/ZdP2hCQmNr

[Guido Crosetto @GuidoCrosetto]

I am very sorry, my friend, truly very sorry.

I completely understand your reflections and the reasons that led you to make this choice.

It is a choice that cannot leave any of us—your colleagues grappling with the very same challenges—indifferent.

I find myself in agreement with almost everything you have written, and the thoughts you have made public today have often been my own as well.

I have chosen to wait for less difficult times, hoping for a positive evolution of the current circumstances.

I do not know whether the path I have chosen is the right one to help foster greater awareness within the Government and the Nation, but the signals I have received lead me to believe that a more conscious understanding is emerging, and therefore that a positive development is possible.

Your words, however, leave a lasting impression.

I hope to see you soon so that we can talk about it.

Take care of yourself.

All the best, John.
Guido

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

@AlistairCarns @JuliaHB1 Al was one of my very best commanders when i was in post. The MOD needs him. This Government needs his knowledge and leadership. If no.10 wont listen to him and Healey we really are screwed.

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

We owe those who serve the UK the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it's done. We are failing on both.

I’ve spent my whole time in government making that case. Number 10 will not listen, so I am resigning as Minister for the Armed Forces.

Letter to the PM below.🫡🫡🫡⬇️⬇️

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

The twerps and the spinners in no.10 cant help it. Almost immediately they are out claiming “the biggest increase since the cold war” and “we are spending 2.6% of GDP on defence in 2027”. Those two “lines to take” are the problem. Dishonest and misleading in order to avoid the reality of spending real funds to keep us safe.

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

John Healey shadowed me for over 4 years. While i didn’t agree with everything he did i know he tried his best and had the interests of the Armed Forces at his heart. i know he loved the job and it will have not been easy to resign. His loyalty to his Party and PM was not reciprocated by them when it mattered and i think he was left with no choice. i wish him the very best. His resignation was one of principle.

[Deborah Haynes @haynesdeborah]

Extraordinarily - and this seems to demonstrate a complete disregard of the seriousness of defence at the heart of government - John Healey was only told what the offer was for additional defence funding on Monday afternoon.

I am told Number 10 then tried to rush and publish the Defence Investment Plan on Thursday.

Then a handbrake was applied by Mr Healey and his military chiefs. The (now ex) defence secretary made clear that racing to release the blueprint without a settlement that had been accepted by him and his team would be a risk for defence and for its soldiers, sailors and aviators.

You can only imagine the tone of the exchange that must have taken place - and I know that people were in the MOD until very late last night.

But John Healey firmly believes the settlement was inadequate and, if left unchallenged, would not enable the UK to keep the country safe or meet its international commitments - such as help defend Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire with Russia.

A key detail is that Mr Healey believes defence spending must be increased to 3% of GDP by 2030, up from 2.3% now. This would guarantee tens of billions of additional pounds for defence.

But - despite the stakes and the position of the defence secretary - the Prime Minister and Chancellor agreed just to inch it up to 2.68% of GDP within that time frame, after hitting a new target of 2.6% next year (which is already being inflated by lumping in the 0.1% that is spent on the intelligence agencies).

Utterly incredible.

What must our allies and our adversaries be thinking, let alone everyone in the UK armed forces and, frankly, everyone in our country?

We all rely on a secure UK to live, work, go to school, enjoy holidays, access healthcare, spend time with friends and families.

This is not a divine right. It happens because we have security - something that might not be apparent until or unless it is compromised...

[Mike Martin MP 🔸 @ThreshedThought]

The fact that John Healy - an ultra-loyal Labour man - has had to resign tells you everything about Starmer and Reeves’ complacent approach to Defence.

They are simply unwilling to lead, make the tradeoffs required, and fund defence properly.

[John Healey @JohnHealey_MP]

My letter to the Prime Minister

[Andy Scotland @asctty]

@NavyLookout @JohnHealey_MP I take my hat off to him for a very honourable but no doubt difficult decision. Starmer, Reeves, Miliband and co are pathetic.