The House has already moved on – reflecting the mood in the country quite accurately. Sir Keir is done, the Member for Makerfield is most notable by his absence and his avoidance of questions. The House thunders on, but now, at a time where there are real and significant problems, the Commons feels that is has no real purpose until it returns from its lengthy Summer holidays in September.
Wednesday 1st July
With Labour benches less full then normal, presumably as members try to position themselves in other ways for the Burnham team’s consideration, the Prime Minister got off to a good start after a recklessly self-defeating question from Dr Alasdair Pinkerton (Surrey Heath, Liberal Democrat) about the fate of the Frimley Heath hospital which Dr Al had previously advised constituents to oppose on the grounds of its impact on local golf facilities which caused understandably widespread hilarity and a rare moment of Starmer-Badenoch unity at the ultimate LibDem-ness of it all.
Sir Keir’s justification for the £5bn gap between the Defence Investment Plan spending estimate published on Tuesday and the £10bn real funding provided also critically, if also hypocritically, depended on taking the Tories as his template, as he pointed out that the last Conservative Defence Spending plan was also underfunded.
However, as soon as LotO moved the questions on to the inevitable ground of Defence spending, the almost-ex PM returned to his established and failed modus operandi of ignoring the question and instead just having a bash at the Tories’ record with his characteristically tedious “We shall take no lectures from the party opposite” line.
It seems that Sir Keir may have forgotten that this was precisely what his Chancellor, the gorgeous Rachel Reeves (Leeds West & Pudsey, Labour) had termed the “Black Hole” that Labour inherited from the Tories in 2024: exactly the unfunded spending commitment that Sir Keir’s Defence Investment Plan now depends on to get to the “£15bn” increase in Defence spending. Starmer & Reeves (which sounds disturbingly like a Music Hall comedy act) completely duck the fact that the £15bn increase outlined in the DIP not only has only £10bn funding attached as it stands, but represents just 53% of the £28bn total the Armed Forces have repeatedly stated that they need. This is the gap that caused the resignation of John Healey (Rawmarsh & Conisbrough, Labour) as Defence Secretary and which itself heralded the demise of the Prime Minister only 10 days ago. This is apparently to be brushed under a very large rug very firmly.
Mrs Badenoch has entered a good patch in her PMQ performance in recent appearances, although admittedly against a hobbled Prime Minister unable to read or rouse the House and today she continued the vein of self-confident wryly-amused persistence.
However, it was left to David Doogan (Angus & Perthshire Glens, SNP) to bring a sense of Scottish outrage at the PM’s failure to take the Defence of the Realm seriously, saying:
“I am gravely concerned that time after time this Prime Minister, in response to the abject and honest criticism of his defence investment plan, cites recent trends in defence spending, when he should be calibrating it against the chronic and very real threat the people on these islands face. In his limited time left in No. 10, will he get a grip of his paper-thin plan?”
Honourable mention too to Lee Anderson (Ashfield, just about every party in sequence, but currently Reform) who asked a corker about illegal migrants replacing nurses in a multiple occupancy house in his constituency, one of whom went on to commit a rape.
Although Anderson is somehow not terribly Parliamentary, this question made the double of a locally, constituency grounded question that flowed in to a passionately argued excoriation of governmental policy. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but it is very effective rhetorically.
The House has passed on, but the after his triumphal but insignificant entry, the House is basically neutered until September. This seems wrong from a democratic point of view, a point of view that the Member for Makerfield is at least superficially prone to say that he thinks matters. We shall see.
Tuesday 30th June
There was a very mixed reception to the new Defence Secretary’s Defence Investment Plan which he brought to the House on Tuesday afternoon. Although Major Dan Jarvis, MBE (Barnsley North, Labour) Defence Secretary, seems to have decided that it was his duty to go “over the top” with a Defence Investment Plan that he had managed to extract £1.5bn more from HM Treasury more than his predecessor, John Healey (Rawmarsh & Conisbrough) had resigned over two weeks previously.
HMG’s positioning of the revised DIP seems to be that the large numbers, if spoken slowly enough, are large enough to awe opposition either on the Labour or the Opposition benches into silence.
Thus “an increase of 27% in spending between 2023/’4 and 2029/’30” and “£74bn allocated to our armed forces next year is now £20bn more than the last year of the previous government” should do the job and that “by the end of this decade the proportion of GDP spent on defence will now be higher than at any time during the last 30 years” can avoid the problem that the actual increase managed by this Government now amounts to a increase from 2.6% to 2.7% of GDP with absolutely no clue about how future administrations might be able to raise this figure from 2.7% to 3.5%. It is, frankly, unbelievable and that is the problem.
Sadly, but all too predictably, the Defence establishment, led by the so recently in office ex Defence Secretary queued up to repeat their opinion that the increase the revised and delayed DIP makes is simply insufficient to the task. As Mr Healey said with creditable understatement: “more needs to be done.”
Sitting alongside the Defence Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, perhaps considering spending more time with her family over the Summer, looked “as sick as a parrot.”
It seems highly unlikely that the Member for Makerfield will bring some miraculous capability to this question.
Monday 29th June
While many political commentators interest was turned towards the new Member for Makerfield’s (entirely empty) speech in Manchester on Monday’s the House considered two issues that Members across the House take very seriously indeed:
– The acceleration of the prisoner early release scheme announced in January.
– The change of use of existing military barracks to house asylum seekers.
The early release of grooming gang members after serving half of their sentences rather than two-thirds as had been normal before the changes in regulations implemented in January was raised as an Urgent Question by Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill & Battle) Shadow Minister for Justice. This question has been brought to the fore by the news(BBC News, 30th June 2026 “Government ‘cannot deport’ grooming gang ringleader”) that Shabir Ahmed, the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang, is now imminently due for release after being sentenced to 19 years imprisonment for multiple rapes in 2012 and generated sustained and impassioned hostility in the Chamber. Jake Richards (Rother Valley, Labour) Justice Minister took the line that there simply was not enough space in prisons to keep these prisoners incarcerated, but he argued that improved probation and tagging procedures would make these early releases “safer” than previous procedures.
The hostility to these early release changes was so strong that even the Speaker broke protocol to emphasise that he too has a constituent who had received a letter advising them of the early release of an offender. Other Members from across the House pushed the Justice Minister on this question included Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley, Labour), Katie Lam (Weald of Kent, Conservative), Sir Gavin Williamson (Stone, Great Wyrly & Penkridge, Conservative), Richard Tice (Reform, Boston & Skegness), Esther McVey (Tatton, Conservative) and Calum Miller (Bicester & Woodstock, Liberal Democrat) and it would be safe to say that there is “extreme scepticism” about including rapists and members of grooming gangs in the accelerated early release scheme. The Government seem determined to push ahead notwithstanding.
Similar levels of exhausted frustration bubbled over from Members on the topic of the identification of MoD barracks to replace hotels and hostels for asylum claimants. Rachel Maskell (York Central, Labour) and Sir Alex Shelbrooke (Wetherby & Easingwold, Conservative) joined forces, rather disconcertingly, to voice opposition to the adoption of the “totally inappropriate” RAF Linton-on-Ouse base for asylum seekers. The topic also caused another unusual intervention from the Chair as the Deputy Speaker’s own constituency (Sussex Weald) is the home of the Crowborough Army training base that has already been repurposed as asylum seekers housing. Alex Norris (Nottingham North & Kimberley, Labour) MoS, Home Office, made it clear that the Deputy Speaker, who had ticked him off quite severely for his failure to come to he House more speedily, also told him “every day” that she is totally opposed to the use of the Crowborough barracks for this use.
Thursday 25th June
Chris Bryant (Rhondda & Ogmore, Labour) Business Minister brought new steel trade protections to the House to replace previous protections expiring on 30th June. The new measures will reduce the levels of tariff free import quotas and introduced a 50% penalty tariff for imports that exceed specific country import quotas.
Unusually, the revised protections received support from Reform, via Richard Tice (Boston& Skegness, Reform UK) who squarely blamed the previous Conservative administration for their failure to develop a strategy to protect British manufacture of steel. Mr Bryant agreed.
Olivia Bailey (Reading West & Mid-Berkshire) Equalities Minister introduced the draft Conversion Practices Bill to make it a crime to use abusive acts to carry out Conversion Therapy to change someone’s sexual orientation or transgender identity. It is a very difficult line to draw to avoid taking in parental discussions with an unsure child or healthcare professionals who seek to discourage candidates for transgender procedures. However, the “carve out” for healthcare professionals causes other some worries that people could misuse their healthcare status to disguise conversion therapy.
Thank you for reading and please check out our instagram @theworldofukpolitics,
Alex
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.