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Sir Keir Starmer is set to unveil 14 former military personnel as Labour candidates for the UK general election as he tries to persuade voters that Britain’s main opposition party can be trusted with the country’s defence.
The Labour leader on Monday will also pledge to continue a trio of current Conservative government policies on the UK’s Trident nuclear defence system, a promise he will dub the “nuclear deterrent triple lock”.
The announcements are part of Starmer’s effort to show voters that Labour has changed since the leadership of his hard-left predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who opposed Trident and was a critic of Nato.
Starmer is also expected to recommit Labour to boosting UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP without setting a deadline. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed he would do so by 2030 if re-elected.
“National security will always come first in the changed Labour party I lead. Keeping our country safe is the bedrock of stability that the British people rightly expect from their government,” Starmer will say on Monday.
The UK is in the process of building four new nuclear submarines in Barrow-in-Furness at a cost of £31bn over the lifetime of the programme. The country maintains a continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent with its existing fleet.
Labour will commit to continuing both policies and deliver all the future upgrades needed for the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet, also the position of the governing Conservatives.
The ex-military candidates set to be announced by Labour include Alistair Carns, a former Royal Marines colonel; Louise Jones, a former army intelligence officer; and Calvin Bailey, a former Royal Air Force commanding officer.
Starmer is likely to face questions over how and when a Labour government would increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, which would amount to £7bn a year extra by 2030. It is currently 2.3 per cent of GDP.
Labour has not set out a fully costed proposal. But Admiral Lord Alan West, a former head of the Royal Navy and former Labour security minister, told the Financial Times Starmer should seek to hit the 2.5 per cent target immediately.
“The world is extremely dangerous . . . I would very much like Keir Starmer and Labour to say: we are immediately going to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent, do a review and if it needs it, look to go above that to 3 per cent,” he said.
While defence tends to be a strong suit for the Tories, recent polling has suggested Labour is more trusted on the topic than the government.
Labour has accused Sunak’s party of being “deeply negligent of Britain’s defence”, noting that the armed forces have fallen short of recruitment targets in each year since the Tories took power in 2010.
Grant Shapps, Tory defence secretary, said Labour represented a “danger to our national security”, noting that a dozen of the party’s frontbenchers in 2016 voted against renewing Trident.
They included deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner and shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, he said, branding Starmer’s pledge to protect the nuclear deterrent “meaningless”.
