Mind the shop! - PMQs 25th June 2025

As last week the PM was absent, leaving the Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) to mind the shop.

Sir Keir was rubbing shoulders with other NATO leaders at the Hague. He took this opportunity to advertise the procurement of a dozen American jets adapted to carry nuclear weapons. Under what circumstances would such weapons be launched from an F-35 fighter? Perhaps the Ukraine’s President Zelensky clarified that when he met Starmer in London ahead of the summit.

The BBC reports that their use would ‘require the authorisation of Nato's nuclear planning group as well as the US president and British prime minister.’

Blogger Simon Webb speculates that there may be a hidden agenda, to do away with our submarine-borne nuclear deterrent, whose Trident missiles are under the UK’s sole control. Add that to giving away the Chagos Islands and lightening border controls at Gibraltar - is it possible to detect a pattern, of letting us become weaker and ill-guarded?

Which brings us to this PMQs session. Labour’s Calvin Bailey made a show of bridling at Reform’s Richard Tice’s criticism of the commanding officer at Brize Norton, where Palestine Action activists (soon to be defined as terrorists) entered the site unchallenged and caused tens of millions of pounds’ worth of damage to RAF planes. Who was minding that shop?

Ms Rayner said Tice’s comments were ‘even more disgraceful’ than the attack itself. Her astonishing nonsense should be read in contrast with what an ex-Army officer has to say on the subject. Imagine if Argentine agents had disabled our refuelling planes during the Falklands war, causing Vulcan bombers to plummet into the Atlantic post-mission - which their pilots were ready to do, if necessary.

Labour’s Bayo Alaba invited Ms Rayner to boast about the Government’s plans for defence spending. They would drive jobs and prosperity, she said.

How has that worked out for those at the sharp end? Since this is Armed Forces Week it is worth looking at what sometimes happens when Mr Atkins reverts to being ‘Tommy’:

Rebecca Long Bailey (Lab) reminded the House how elderly military veterans harmed by nuclear weapons testing had had the results of their medical tests suppressed; the DPM said ‘we’ would look into it. Ben Lake (Plaid Cymru) told how permanently injured former members of the armed services were harassed with frequent repeat disability assessments; the DPM thanked him for raising the case. Cameron Thomas (Lib Dem) said the Ministry of Defence had never accepted liability for the ‘various cancers, crippling illnesses and deformities’ caused to service personnel and their descendants by exposure to nuclear testing on Christmas Island in 1957; the DPM referred him to the Minister for Veterans (Alistair Carns MP.) Can somebody in the shop come to the counter more quickly, please?

The crisis that we are approaching as a nation has stemmed from both Parties’ failure to attend to business, to know the fundamentals. As a Question Time audience member said two years ago, neither Party was fit to run a whelk stall.

Let us ‘gently’ (to use a popular Labour bully-word) suggest some principles for running the country:

1. While being prepared to defend ourselves, avoid unnecessary entanglement in foreign conflicts. Two world wars - and we initiated our entry into both - have nearly ruined us beyond recovery.

2. Guard our borders, and guard against enemies within.

3. Find well-paid work for our people.

It is time to reconsider economic basics and their implications for society. If the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are right, public debt is not so scary as the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility would have it. If we need more money for productive projects we can create it by fiat; if we attain (near) full employment and the economy begins to overheat money can be sucked back out of the system by taxation.

Where MMT-supporting economists such as Steve Keen and Richard J Murphy are in agreement with MAGA is in holding that a sustained foreign trade deficit is a threat, because it mean progressively giving our assets (and so control) to outsiders.

We are an advanced economy and our competitive edge in foreign trade is in services, which almost but not quite compensate for the negative balance in goods trading. The latter would be helped if we were not hobbled by ‘green energy’ and Net Zero ideas.

So what we need is a highly-skilled workforce. Boosting our population with the import of cheap labour may increase GDP but will make us poorer per capita; and given the Welfare State will add to our economic burden, at least to start with.

Second generation immigrants may benefit from our education system and may be encouraged by their elders to take maximum advantage of such opportunities, but in an economy under strain they may simply be crowding out indigenous (if we may call them that) youngsters. So it is that the bottom tier of underachievers is largely composed of white working-class boys, cemented into failure by lack of aspiration at a time when it is needed. Do schools really have to focus on minority sexual obsessions and class/racial victim-consciousness when children should be learning useful skills? Why do more schools not adopt Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School as their model?

Labour came in with a different agenda. One was further devolution, a plan that may have been intended to ensure the Conservatives would never regain power. The Tories have managed to do that without outside help; their shooting-gallery leadership machinations seem to have been steered not so much by the ‘men in grey suits’ as by men in gitis.

Now it looks as though Gordon Brown’s devolution master plan is on the back burner; we need another layer of local government princelings like another hole in the head. This comes as a relief to Plymouth, for one (too late for London, though.)

However the Tories’ Neil O’Brien now told the DPM that the expansion of cities such as Leicester into outlying areas was unwanted; she gave him a blethery answer which appeared to boil down to ‘we are getting on and doing it’ and yah boo sucks.

Meanwhile the economic (and associated political) breakdown continues. Labour whip Vicky Foxcroft has resigned over the issue of proposed benefit cuts and some 120-plus Party MPs seem set to rebel. The Lib Dem’s deputy leader also declared her party’s opposition to slashed personal independence payments and carer’s allowance.

This additional financial pressure on poorer households is made more acute by the rise in housing costs:

‘In 1968, housing costs constituted 9% of average disposable incomes for households in the poorest quarter of the population; this rose to 26% in 2015 before falling to 21% in 2021. Even after accounting for housing benefit, the poorest households spent 19% of their income on housing in 2016, the latest year for which these data accounting for housing benefit are available.’

Labour’s Debbie Abrahams called for more affordable housing, and the DPM talked about Labour’s investment in this area. However on current net immigration trends the pressure on housing will not lessen even if Ms Rayner’s building target (1.5 million houses) is met. Sir Oliver Dowden (Con) spoke of ‘family houses being converted into houses in multiple occupation, leading to a surge in antisocial behaviour and parking problems.’

Will no-one in either major (legacy?) Party mention the elephant in the room? What do they imagine will happen if this continues? Do they not see what is happening already? While deploring the ‘recent disorder on the streets of Northern Ireland’ Belfast’s Gavin Robinson (DUP) spoke of the Windsor framework and the need for sovereign control of immigration.

Who is running the shop?

The DPM and her opposite number (Sir Mel Stride today) exchanged banter about leadership changes but Andrew Snowden (Con) took it further, asking ‘who she would get rid of in the coming reshuffle’ and naming much of the Government’s front bench.

What is needed is not so much a reshuffle as a big pile of discards.

Or even, in this game of political Canasta, two whole new packs.

From Wolves of Westminster