WITH all the talk of funding Britain’s defences in the face of an imminent threat from Russia, you might be forgiven for thinking that Vladimir Putin is the biggest menace to our national security.
But you’d be wrong. And, no, it isn’t China, Iran or Islamist terrorists either.
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The greatest danger to our nation’s defences is actually the group of people sitting behind Prime Minister Andy Burnham on the green leather benches in the House of Commons.
I am, of course, talking about Labour’s 403 MPs.
It is the ranks of Labour MPs — both on the backbenches and those serving in the Government, including Andy Burnham himself — who are the real threat because it is they who are preventing us from being able to defend ourselves.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has this week joined the Reform leader Nigel Farage in pledging to raise spending on defence to three per cent of GDP by 2030 — all funded by slashing welfare spending.
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Yet the man who is sitting in Downing Street with the power to deliver that promise right now is point blank refusing to make that vow.
Even more astonishingly, so is his Chancellor John Healey, who resigned as Defence Secretary just a few short months ago because he claimed that budget boost was vital to keep Britain safe.
Why? Because Labour would rather spend billions on welfare for millions of people who don’t need it than keep the entire nation secure.
This, after all, is the same bunch of lefties who voted down an attempt by Sir Keir Starmer to cut the planned increase in the welfare bill by just £5billion to free up some extra cash.
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Instead of funding our military properly, we have created an army of mental health malingerers living on benefits whose votes are crucial to the Labour MPs who want to keep their own well-paid jobs in Parliament, and who believe that cutting welfare to boost defence spending is not only the wrong thing to do, it’s immoral and cruel.
Even if failing to deter the threat from Russia means we are far more likely to end up having to go to war, which would cost many, many thousands of lives.
That’s the real problem. We have a huge majority in Parliament for an entire party that just doesn’t accept reality.
We have hundreds of Labour MPs who think that taxing people more and spending more public money will deliver growth, who insist that men can magically become women, who genuinely fear that we’re all about to die in a climate change catastrophe, and who really do believe that the people who don’t want a free-for-all for any foreign criminal to come to our shores are all far-right fascists.
They are dangerously delusional. They are fantasists, living in a left-wing la-la land of their own hysterical imaginations.
When it comes to the very real threats facing our nation, they bury their heads in the sand.
Whether it’s illegal migrants raping women and girls, or the madness of Net Zero’s stranglehold on our economy, or the menace of Putin’s Russia, they simply shrug their shoulders, sip on their almond milk lattes and pretend it’s not happening.
Despite years of increasingly frantic warnings from military chiefs and Nato allies about the threat from Russia, most Labour MPs — like our most recent and current PM — won’t do anything but pay lip service to the defence of the realm.
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There are a few honourable exceptions on Labour’s benches, such as Tan Dhesi, the chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, who has argued that more investment is “imperative”, warning that, with Trump’s waning interest in European security, Burnham’s “vibes” weren’t going to be enough to keep us safe.
Yet his fellow Labour MP Diane Abbott insisted this week that the Russian threat was “Nato fiction” made up to justify giving in to Donald Trump’s demands for more defence spending.
Tell that to the Ukrainians burying their war dead for the last four years.
Then there’s the latest sabre-rattling from Argentine President Javier Milei over his bid to claim the Falkland Islands 44 years after his country’s invasion of the sovereign British territory.
Could we even defend our fellow Brits if Milei did the same?
Spending more on defence isn’t an optional extra.
It’s a necessity. In fact, even boosting our defence spending to three per cent of our national income is only the bare minimum we need to commit.
Britain is spending just 2.3 per cent of GDP — that’s £68billion — on defence this year.
An increase to three per cent by 2030, given current growth forecasts, would mean spending £108billion on our military that year, with a Nato pledge to spend even more to reach 3.5 per cent by 2035.
But in all likelihood, we could already be spending ten times that by 2035 if we are already at war.
It’s not just dangerous to fail to boost defence spending. It’s immoral.
If we do not have the military forces and equipment to defeat our enemies if they want to attack us, then we cannot deter that attack. And that puts British lives at risk.
Spending money on defence is the best way — the only way — to avoid war.
If Labour MPs don’t face up to reality soon, the cost to our nation will be a far heavier price to pay.
TEMPTED BY 2-FOR-1 DEAL, DON?
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AT least someone is happy that Prince Harry and Meghan have moved back to Britain.
That someone is Donald Trump, who’s said he was glad to see the back of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
“I was not a fan”, he said of the Duchess, who was “disrespectful” to the late Queen and King Charles.
I’m wondering if we’re missing a trick here, now that Sir Keir Starmer has decided to end his political career with one last U-turn (by resigning as an MP when he said he wouldn’t) to, he says, focus on “international affairs”.
I’m not sure what the rest of the world has done to deserve Starmer’s attentions, but since we don’t want him any more, why don’t we create a new US version of Starmer’s one-in, one-out deal with France to return Channel migrants.
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We’ve taken back two unwanted migrants to America so it’s only fair that, in return, we should ask President Trump if he will offer safe refuge to just one used ex-Prime Minister (nearly new, one careful former national owner and a huge life-long pension).
For the man who wrote “The Art Of The Deal”, this two-for-one offer is the bargain of the century.