A shadow Treasury minister says he welcomes the chancellor's £2.2bn boost to defence spending, but adds, "to invest in defence you've got to have a strong economy as well" and that "growth has flatlined". James Wild says, "the threats that we as a country are facing are increasing and we need to step up with our allies to deal with those". Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We welcome increased defence spending but to invest in defence you have to have a strong
00:04economy as well and unfortunately the decisions the Chancellor took in October mean that growth
00:08has flatlined. So we support higher defence spending, we want to get to 3% by the end
00:13of the Parliament, we want the government to go further and faster.
00:15We did commit to increase defence spending to 2.5%. During my time in the Ministry of
00:20Defence we started investing again in the budget, we inherited a bad situation in 2010
00:25and we want to continue to see defence spending increasing. The threats that we as a country
00:30are facing are increasing and we need to step up with our allies to deal with those.
00:33Well the government's come to all of these measures quite late, we suggested that they
00:37get into welfare reform much sooner, they've come forward with a package of £5 billion,
00:42although we hear that may be downgraded to £3.4 billion. We had a considered package of £12
00:48billion of savings, we want to take the civil service back to pre-Covid levels. With all of
00:53these measures the government's rushed them forward in order to try and avoid the Chancellor
00:58breaking her fiscal rules and that's why she's having to come to Parliament for her emergency
01:01statement today.