Starmer’s Trump meeting ‘spectacular success’, says Streeting, as Tories dismiss president’s backing for Chagos deal – UK politics live
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Health secretary hails talks over defence, security and trade as Badenoch says her party will continue to oppose Chagos deal
Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for a generational increase in defence spending, Pippa Crerar reveals.
Keir Starmer intends to follow his shock decision this week to slash aid spending to fund a higher defence budget with radical moves on welfare reform and immigration restrictions, Patrick Maguire reports in his Times column today. Here’s an extract.
What we do know, however, is that Starmer is seizing this moment of geopolitical crisis as permission to remake the Labour party. And by that, for once, I do mean Starmer himself: not the cabinet he is largely ignoring nor the aides who often do much of this thinking for him. Experience is pushing him towards solutions whose radicalism Labour governments tend only to countenance under extreme duress. This week it was higher defence spending and aid cuts; in the weeks to come, I am told, it will be welfare reform, an overhaul of the machinery of government, and new immigration restrictions. (No 10 has its sights trained on the care sector, which it believes is abusing visas to suppress wages.)
Much of this is born of Starmer’s deep frustrations — with traditional allies in his party, within the civil service and on the world stage. Becoming prime minister has given him less power than he would like. As one senior adviser explains: “If the PM asks officials for a glass of water, they’ll give him a glass of water. But they’ll also say: ‘We’re really good at making tea, actually, so we’ll just keep doing that.’” This restlessness and resentment is all over the 1,500-word letter he sent to cabinet ministers earlier this month, again, mostly his own words, honed over several long conversations with trusted aides rather than scripted for him. “The split between our own preconceived ideas and, frankly, reality has created a schism,” he wrote. “We must mend it — and we must do so through actions not words.”
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