Sir Keir Starmer says national security ‘comes first’ as he makes pitch to Tory voters
Sir Keir Starmer will put defence and national security at the heart of Labour’s election pitch to voters during a visit to the North West on Monday.
Sir Keir will pledge Labour as the “party of national security” as he meets forces veterans and candidates.
He will also reaffirm the party’s commitment to the so-called “nuclear deterrent triple lock”, which includes a commitment to construct the four new nuclear submarines in Barrow-in-Furness.
The Labour leader will also repeat his ambition to increase defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) – a target Rishi Sunak has said he wants to meet by 2030 – when economic conditions allow.
As well as the commitment to build four new submarines, under the “triple lock” Labour is also promising to maintain Britain’s continuous at-sea deterrent and deliver all future upgrades needed for the submarines to patrol the waters.
The Vanguard-class submarines are due to be replaced by the bigger Dreadnought-class submarines in the 2030s, with between £31bn and £41bn set aside for the upgrade, according to the House of Commons Library.
Sir Keir’s focus on defence is part of a wider strategy to convince voters that the party has changed from the days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
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The Conservatives have consistently pointed out that the current Labour leader served in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet when he held critical stances towards NATO and the nuclear deterrent Trident.
As part of the bid to reassure voters, Sir Keir has chosen 14 ex-military personnel to stand for the party at the election.
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Sir Keir said: “National security will always come first in the changed Labour Party I lead.
“Keeping our country safe is the bedrock of stability that the British people rightly expect from their government.
“My message to them is clear: Labour has changed. No longer the party of protest, Labour is the party of national security.
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“The excellent former service personnel that are standing as Labour candidates are a testament to that change.”
Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, said 12 current members of Sir Keir’s top team – including his deputy Angela Rayner and shadow foreign secretary David Lammy – previously voted against Trident.
“We know Rayner is now making the decisions in Labour, so Starmer’s supposed backing for Trident is meaningless,” he claimed.
“Labour’s refusal to commit to 2.5% defence spending by 2030 shows that they are a danger to our national security. Uncertain times call for a clear plan and bold action to chart a course to a secure future, only the Conservatives offer that.”
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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