Andy The Sucker

He's got the job no-one wanted.

Congratulations Andy! You’ve become Prime Minister unopposed and without the tiresome chores of publishing a manifesto and winning a general election.

Think about that. Not a single one of the 402 other members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, all of whom are ambitious and many of whom have more experience than you, entered the competition to replace Starmer. Has your felonious friend Louise Haigh been busy with the bribes and threats? Or do they know something you don’t know? Perhaps the really ambitious ones, like Miliband’s protégé Torsten Bell, are biding their time and sharpening their daggers.

The media (and no doubt your own PR bods) have dubbed you the King of The North and, along with Louisa Haigh, view you as the Labour Party’s salvation after the underperformance of the past two years. As the real king, Charles III, might remind you on Monday, most of the United Kingdom doesn’t live in t’North, however you define it. Praising something because it’s “northern” cuts no mustard in Abergavenny and butters no parsnips in Lincolnshire.

“The North” is ill-defined in politics and complicated by geography. There is little history of agreement on either side of the Ribble, and it extends long after the Wars of the Roses. Rivalry between the Geordies of Tyneside and Liverpudlian Scousers extends beyond Premier League football. Both Manchester and Liverpool lie more than fifty miles south of The Angel of the North. Change your moniker. Urgently. And get real; London generates almost twice the GDP per head that the Northwest does.

Upgrade your wardrobe too. Add some formal dignity to your attire; wear ties and shirts with collars. Tee shirts are for media celebs and models and their entourage. You’re about to become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; show some respect and dress for the part. And, unlike your predecessor, pay for your clothes yourself. And your glasses and your eyebrow plucking.

The reality that should define your thinking is that there is no money; the country is utterly reliant on the bond markets to keep functioning. It will remain that way until a government manages to balance its budget. John Major managed it and Tony Blair stuck with it for two years. The UK will remain in hock to the bond markets until the deficit is gone. Your predecessor failed to deliver growth and the deficit is increasing, not least due to the increasing interest rates on the country’s colossal debts. Your return hasn’t calmed the markets, and gilt yields remain at 10-year highs.

You have said that you want to raise tax “a little”. The wealthy are already fleeing and the rest of the country, or at least those who work, are suffering from Rachel Reeves’ tax and NI increases as growth stutters and recession looms. More taxation won’t stimulate growth and higher tax rates may not increase the tax take (go and read about the Laffer curve). Therein is the reason no one else wanted the job; if you can’t fix the deficit through an increased tax take (be that from growth or increasing the rate), you must cut expenditure.

That’s not “unashamedly Labour” (whatever that means), and many of your backbenchers don’t accept it, which was one of the main contributors to the vacancy at Number 10. Somehow you’re going to have to persuade them that there is no money and fight the battles about what gets cut; that’s tough in any party but particularly yours. Somehow you need to find the language to explain to your MPs, members and voters (those that remain) that a deficit is a tax on the unborn, that running a deficit is profligate extravagance with a future voter’s money. Fortunately, you have a degree in English and were (briefly) a journalist, so you can craft some clever wordings. Beware relying on soundbites alone – the bond markets are watching you.

You can reasonably blame the Tories for much of the debt and, therefore, the interest bills. You could have a bit of fun pointing out that Labour has just voted down the Plaid Cymru budget in the Senedd because it was playing fast and loose with welfare spending. Tread carefully though; your Labour MSs were voting alongside Reform and the Tories.

You have been left a huge problem with defence spending. The current Secretary of State, (increasingly) Desperate Dan Jarvis, thought he had increased the funding settlement in the Defence Investment Plan. It’s still got a yawning chasm of at least £5 billion in it, which renders last year’s Strategic Defence Review undeliverable. You must cut through the crap and bin them both, then start again from reality. You might ask why 47 out of 49 major MOD programmes are in trouble. Asking is one thing; getting a useful answer is another, and the MOD actually learning lessons from enquiries is unheard of.

The awful truth is that the Defence of The Realm (arguably your first duty) depends on money, and there isn’t any spare. Rebuilding the armed forces requires lots of money for a long time, which won’t happen until you teach your party economic realities (good luck with that) or growth comes, which isn’t looking likely anytime soon.

What you can do is stop doing stupid stuff, which starts with binning the Chagos deal in its entirety. That will save a few billion and might buy you some credit with The Don. You’re a lefty, so you probably loathe him. So what? The United States is our most powerful ally and our biggest export market. We need to be on good terms, something your predecessor managed for a few months before he caved in to the anti-Israel lobby.

You could do yourself and the country a huge favour by refusing to measure increased defence capability in terms of percentages of GDP, which is an inaccurate input. Measure it instead in terms of output, that is, warships at sea, working fighter jets available and credible army brigades trained and equipped. As at today the numbers are very, very low, which means that increasing actual capability takes less money than anyone thinks.

The low availability of warships, particularly submarines, is mostly due to a lack of maintenance funds and engineering expertise; buying that in is one heck of a lot cheaper than doubling the defence budget or the £70 billion or so that delivering SDR would actually require. It would be quicker and more effective; you could have four submarines at sea in place of the current big fat zero.

You could reasonably argue, for example, that although we’ve promised two divisions to NATO, previous Prime Ministers’ decisions have left us unable to field a combat-ready brigade (one division is generally at least three brigades). Seek praise for your honesty while getting warships to sea and fixing fighters. You might find it prudent to upgrade, or even expand, the Typhoon fleet and their Meteor missiles. The RAF will hate that – they want £8 billion to spend on developing their next shiny toy, the Global Combat Air Programme. That’s the same RAF that is currently defending the Falkland Islands with the ageing Tranche One Typhoons. Given Argentina’s rhetoric, you should enquire whether just four old jets are enough, particularly as the Argentine air force has upgraded significantly; by the end of this year it will have 24 upgraded F-16s from Denmark.

The key word is upgraded; these jets are as capable as other generation fighters, like the Typhoon. The package includes aircrew training by former USAF fighter pilot instructors. Odds of six to one against are challenging. Don’t blame The Don; America is keen to prevent China from arming countries in Latin America, and that was the alternative being explored by Argentina. (The Chinese JF-17 is also a fourth-generation fighter and is a highly capable aircraft). Argentina’s Air Force is substantially more capable than it was five years ago, when it had broadly similar capabilities to those it had in the Falklands War.

While you wait for an answer on the Falklands, you should ask whether Russia is a threat or not. One government narrative is that Russia is being fought to a standstill and imminent collapse by Ukraine, supported by the UK and much of the rest of Europe. It’s costing us about £5 billion a year, most of which doesn’t come from the defence budget. Not all the Russian army is involved in the war – no conscripts are being sent – but it’s a huge drain on weaponry and personnel. There is almost no chance of Russia invading anywhere else while the war in Ukraine continues. That war is at a stalemate as both sides struggle to force a decisive outcome. It is therefore not in the UK’s interest for the war to end, as the ongoing conflict precludes a Russian invasion of the Baltics or any other NATO country.

The competing government narrative is that Russia will be a significant threat by 2030. The only way Russia could become a significant threat is if the war in Ukraine ends and Russia refurbishes its economy and armed forces. Neither event seems likely, so why is NATO declaring that Russia is preparing to attack? Ask for the evidence and remember the bomber and missile gaps of the Cold War. Both turned out to be miscalculations by the intelligence communities. Both made a fortune for the military-industrial complex. Remember Eisenhower (not a peacenik) said, ‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. “Get your guard up.

That’s not to say that Russia isn’t increasing its military capability nor that it has hostile intent to the West in general and the UK in particular. Military capability always increases in times of war (and Special Military Operations). Resentment grows when western-supplied and supported weaponry causes a million Russian casualties. You must decide if the (failed) rules based international order, so often invoked by your predecessors, is worth so much death and destruction. Or Armageddon, come to that? You’re one of the nine people on the planet who has nuclear weaponry at your disposal; you should be thinking about this. Deeply.

Indeed, you should have thought about it before you decided to become Labour Party leader. As you’re about to find out, defence and economics are only part of the policy mess that you have taken over. So far you haven’t articulated a policy, answered questions or even explained why you want to be Prime Minister and why you think you’ll be any good at it. You might have been given the trust of (some of) 400 Labour MPs, but that cuts no mustard with the public or the bond markets.

There may be a “Burnham bounce” in the opinion polls; dead cats bounce too.

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