Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge says the government needs to be “transparent with the British people” over the amount of extra money being spent on defence. Earlier today Defence Secretary John Healey suggested the real-terms increase in defence spending year-on-year will be only around half the £13.4 billion figure cited by the prime minister yesterday. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Well I'm extremely concerned because this is about the national interest of our country.
00:03Funding defence is a fundamental issue where there should be consensus and we do support that,
00:08but I cannot get over the fact that we've woken up this morning and the Defence Secretary himself
00:14is unable to back up the figures used in Parliament yesterday by the Prime Minister
00:18and I think a really key background point to this is that when Kemi Badenoch stood up at
00:23the dispatch box to face Keir Starmer yesterday and asked questions of him, we had not been given
00:29a statement with any facts in it. It was redacted as the Speaker said at the beginning. That is
00:33not normal practice and we were, to put it bluntly, pretty frustrated about that,
00:38but now you see the consequence because when he said 13.4 billion we'd had no advance sight of
00:43that so we couldn't have checked that in advance, we couldn't call him to account in front of
00:46Parliament and now this morning it's unravelling on the airwaves. So you know we do need urgent
00:50clarity from the Government, they need to be transparent with the British people and get
00:53on with it. This is above that sort of machinations and I hope that they will now set the record
00:58straight. What the Prime Minister has said is he is cutting the aid budget which is something we
01:02suggested at the weekend because as important as aid is we think the military is now the most
01:06important area we need to invest in because of the threats we face. So we supported him on that
01:11but he's got to be clear about the figures. If it's actually only £6 billion he should say so
01:15but he said £13.4 billion, that's an enormous difference, that's £7.4 billion, you can buy a
01:21lot of equipment with that. So I think they need to urgently clarify the position and be straight
01:24with the British people.