Reform Shenanigans
Zia Yusuf stepped down as Chairman of Reform on Thursday evening and then seems to have had a bit of a moment and announced on Saturday that he would instead take up a new role heading the DOGE-lite team that is going to nip around Reform-controlled County Councils to suggest ways of reducing council expenditure as a sort of crack management consultancy team, spreadsheets and incomprehension to the fore.
Cue lots of chat about how many people have failed to stick with Mr Farage’s leadership, but the “final straw” for Yusuf seems to have been the new REFORM MP’s call for a “burqa ban” at her first PMQ which was not REFORM policy. This is, at best, very murky, but suggests that while Yusuf had been pushing hard to establish a professionalised structure for the “wider party”, the top team (perhaps “team” is not the right word) seem to be making it up as they go along and are pretty much beyond discipline, which does not bode well if the party slips in to the role of the official Opposition as the Tories implode.
UK Defence Review
The Strategic Defence Review was unveiled by the PM on Monday in the new Janet Harvey Hall of BAE Systems’ shipyard at Govan in Glasgow named in honour of a woman who joined the shipyard workforce in 1940 as part of the UK’s war efforts and who died in 2023 at the age of 101.
As predicted by foresighted bloggers the Review unveiled a commitment to 11 new conventionally-armed attack submarines, new drone-manufacturing programmes, increased spend on cyber-defence and renewal of the warheads on the main nuclear deterrent fleet. Bloggers expecting nuclear news in the Review had to be content with this latter, not terribly exciting announcement, rather than the commitment to reinstating air or ground launched nukes in the British arsenal.
The Review was welcomed just about all around, but the narrative got away from the spinmeisters as almost immediately attention shifted to the PM’s failure to commit to the 3.5% defence spending target that NATO is almost certain to demand from European members in the next few weeks.
Starmer trumpeted the UK’s commitment to move from 2.3% to 2.5% by 2027, but in answer to (quite gentle) journalist questions he refused to commit to a date for 3.0%, let alone the 3.5% that Mark Rutte and NATO are set on announcing at the NATO Summit in The Hague coming up on 24th-26th June following the agreement of NATO defence ministers in Brussels on Thursday 5th June.
The UK’s failure to commit to 3.0% as a baseline and ultimately the 3.5% defence spending target will now work as a drag anchor tied around the Labour Government’s neck. It has to be said that the change in European attitudes to defence spending stands out as a singular Trump achievement, although at the expense of the astonishingly courageous Ukrainians!
Trump-Musk Fallout
Meanwhile the world was transfixed by the collapse of the Trump-Musk friendship, catalogued in real-time on their competing vanity social media platforms. It was inevitable that the egos would fall out at some point, but this seemed to be on steroids (or opioids perhaps.) Musk departed the White House and DOGE a week ago and then on Tuesday weighed in on Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (also known as the “Hooogest Transfer of Powers to the Super-Rich at the Nation’s Expense”) calling it a “disgusting abomination” on Twitter X and then reminding Donald and Republicans that they had been committed to the reduction of US borrowing in theory.
Things got ugly and the “President” suggested that he could easily save a chunk of change by removing Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX government subsidies and supportive legislation. Musk, ever thoughtful, hit back by saying that the real reason the so-called “Epstein Files” remained undisclosed is because Trump himself features. Although staffers had obviously been sent out to “de-escalate”, by the time the weekend hoved in to view the stand-off seemed to be holding. The Pres himself said “Nah, not interested, bro’s a loser” or something similar. This provides useful, if terrifying insight in to how the blame game following a nuclear exchange under Trump might work out.
Busy week! Check out our insta at: @theworldofukpolitics
Leave a Reply