Housing for servicepeople should be ‘defence policy priority’, Tories say
Housing for servicepeople should be a “defence policy priority”, the Conservatives have said as they unveiled their new defence strategy.
On Friday, Iran launched an attack on Israel in retaliation to Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. US President Donald Trump has refused to rule out US involvement, with the caveat that he is “not going to take [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] out (kill!), at least not for now.”
While Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been busy trying to convince world leaders to exercise “restraint and de-escalation,” Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge presented the Tories’ defence plan to keep servicemen and women in the UK’s armed forces.
Cartlidge said the Tories “must always prioritise the men and women behind the uniform,” by prioritising rebuilding the defence estate, improving the housing available, and creating a housing association with “prudential borrowing power.”
Cartlidge argued the government must stem the net loss of service people, many of whom cite a clash between their families and their work. “For a party that believes in the family, it must be a defence policy priority for it to be possible to both serve in the armed forces and raise a family,” Cartlidge said.
The new Conservative defence policy involved ring-fencing the funding allocated to service family accommodation so it “cannot then be raided by HMT or other parts of MoD,” and “extending home ownership throughout the ranks.”
‘John Healey was right’
The shadow defence secretary criticised the Labour government’s promise to increase the ranks of the armed forces and reserves in the 2030s. This is “a long way off. Russians will have presumably noted that,” Cartilage added.
He suggested the government was focusing excessively on ramping up defence capabilities in the form of arms and other such gear. There is “no point in the Strategic Defence Review promising up to 12 attack submarines if you don’t have the crews to operate them or the engineers to maintain them,” he said.
Though Cartlidge did concede that his party was aligned with the government on some issues, including that rearming is necessary, such as by increasing the UK’s stores of munitions, drones, and other “autonomous and uncrewed technology,” which constitute a “revolutionary way to increase our mass and lethality.”
He admitted that there is no “silver bullet” to the “fundamental” issue of retention in the forces.
Eventually addressing the mounting conflict between Iran and Israel, the defence shadow secretary said “we don’t know what the United States is going to do,” but that Defence Secretary John Healey “was right … where he said we’ve got RAF Typhoons in the region. They are there if we need them.”