Upbeat vibes are not enough.

PMQs was not a close contest this week – but a serious defeat for the PM.

Although LotO began predictably enough on defence spending, the PM was unexpectedly knocked out on Question 2 and remained down and out. Mrs Badenoch’s second question on defence spending had the PM on the run:

LotO: “The Chancellor used to say that not hitting 3% by 2030 would put our troops at risk. He also said that Keir Starmer was “unable”, and the Treasury “unwilling”, to provide that funding. So is the Prime Minister unable, or is he just unwilling, to get that money by 2030?”

This question produced an extraordinary act of self-harm from the Prime Minister who uttered the timeless classic:

PM: “We do everything to support our national security, but it cannot come at the expense of social security. Having strong national security also depends on resilience in our communities. We on the Labour Benches will not be forced to choose between the two, and we will set out a plan to get to 3.5% by 2035 at the spending review.”

The Prime Minister thus admitted that it is unlikely that next year’s spending review will allow the former Defence Secretary to set out a route to increase defence spending to 3.0% of GDP by 2030 – the very failure that he so recently resigned over.

In answer to LotO’s third and fourth questions, the PM dug himself further in to his spending hole with an industrial-sized excavator rather than the normal political shovel and produced an economically incomprehensible rehash of “The Labour Way” (The Smiths presumably rather than Sinatra) explaining that his approach would be to spend more on Housing Benefit and support to help NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) into employment so that the taxbase would increase (I am paraphrasing) to produce more tax revenues available to increase defence spending.

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. This will not work and it is scarcely credible. Austerity may have been an economic error, but it is delightfully clear that welfare prodigality is an order of magnitude more absurd as a bet on economic growth.

LotO’s sixth and final question stuck with defence spending, but widening its scope to include the potential revival of the Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius, she asked the King of the North whether he was simply a “continuity Keir.” Hilariously, in response, the Prime Minister performed a perfect, classic “Starmer” and pivoted to a non-answer about having shown leadership on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Tuesday 8th September

This new-found international leadership the PM avoided the question with referred back to new Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s statement on Tuesday 8th September, outlining the government’s altered stance on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

Miliband, who is rather over-fond of his own intellectual abilities, explained the rationale for introducing SAMLA (Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018) measures aimed at goods and services from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That rationale is, however, not that complicated: the eviction of Palestinians from their long-held homes makes the possibility of the “Two State Solution” ever more remote and so must be condemned strongly and as publicly as possible. There, not too much brainpower required for that really.

The key change in the government’s position is the acceptance of the ICJ’s 2024 “advisory opinion” that Israel’s occupation is illegal under international law. The Foreign Secretary went further when he suggested that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands through settler proxies represents nothing less than “ethnic cleansing” which is a very significant escalation from the previous government’s position.

This change of UK policy may not have terribly significant economic effects (imports in to the UK from settler communities in the West Bank must be minuscule and in any case very difficult to distinguish from imports from non-settler parts of Israel) but it will have significant political effects internationally. Israel predictably reacted with fury, re-hashing the idea of recognising Argentina’s rights to the Falkland Islands, closing the UK’s East Jerusalem consulate and banning visits from 12 mostly left-wing MPs. Meanwhile, America’s Ambassador to Israel threatened all sorts of consequences. One gets the feeling that this is a fight that the King of the North must have picked deliberately.

Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge, Conservative) Shadow ForSec, who has been a strong and consistent supporter of Israel, agreed that illegal settlements were wrong, but opposed the government’s escalation on the grounds of practicality (the import ban will not be able to distinguish products from illegal settlements); timing, with the potential encouragement of even greater extremism at the Israeli elections due on 27^th October and collateral damage to the relationship with Israel’s security agencies, which have been crucial in British interceptions of domestic terrorist events.

It is not the habit of Commons Weekly to reflect significantly outside the Chamber itself, but in this instance, the contextual broadening of a recent NYT article is worth jumping the paywall for (Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheimer & Ronen Bergman, New York Times [PAYWALL], 31^st August 2026 “These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat.”)

Brig-Gen. Ephraim Sneh “This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply”
Air Force Gen. Asaf Agmon “Once a society behaves this way, that society is doomed.”
Moshe Ya’alon, former Army chief of staff “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse. The master race is us.”
Air Force Gen. Nehemia Dagan “We have lost ourselves, and we have lost this fight”

Monday 7th September

Housing and Local Government ministers fielded questions about Green Belt development, local authority housing revenues and fiscal devolution and how that all fitted with the “No.10 North” regional growth strategy.

Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne, Labour) Housing Sec, announced that the never-ending saga of local government reorganisation will be paused and reviewed AGAIN after Reform-led councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex and Conservative-led Hampshire challenged the government’s plans. Again.

The remaining stages of the Health Bill were also debated on Monday 7^th September focusing on the next structural reorganization of the NHS and the abolition of NHS England (NHSE). No doubt, some equivalent national body will be re-introduced as a “major innovation” in about 2038. Easy work for management consultants.

However, the Commons was also treated to a significant if not enjoyable work of magical realism in the form of a statement on the anti-immigration protests in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend from Sarah Jones (Croydon West, Labour) MoS Policing & Crime. The hapless minister described the Portsmouth protests in these terms:

“At around 8 pm, a group of more than 200 protesters arrived at the harbour, intending to block three coaches that were due to take the arrivals for processing. Many of those protesters were dressed in all black and wearing face masks. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, with the support of other neighbouring forces, used a dispersal notice to ensure public safety. Officers were forced to use batons and PAVA spray to maintain order in the face of some aggression. They worked through the evening and into the early hours of the morning, and at around 4 am, protesters began to disperse and the coaches eventually set off.”

Having watched footage of the Portsmouth protests in the late evening on Sunday, it seemed to me that Sarah Jones’s characterisation of the Portsmouth demonstration was significantly misleading.

The footage of the demonstration clearly shows the overwhelming majority of the protestors to be concerned local residents and not the balaclava-wearing far-rightists that had disrupted Dover on Saturday. Still, best to worry everyone en route to justifying dispersal orders and heavy-handed police action. The Burnham government, like its Starmer predecessor, tries to convince itself and everyone else that it is inconceivable that ordinary residents might object to the sudden arrival of boatfuls of asylum claimants and by refusing to take this possibility head on, confirms the very worst fears of precisely these people. It does not take a masked Yaxley-Lennon type to whip these fears up: there is genuinely-held and viscerally-expressed anger about successive governments’ failure to act decisively on immigration. At some point this will boil over unless dealt with directly and clearly.

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After one full week of the new Burnham team facing the Commons, the House now takes five weeks off for party conference season, so Commons Weekly will be back on 14th October, barring unexpected excitements in the House.

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Alex