Kemi Badenoch vows to ditch green spending to rearm Britain with £17bn fund for 'war readiness'
The Tory leader accused Labour of failing to invest in the UK’s armed forces.
Kemi Badenoch has vowed to scrap green spending to pay for a multibillion-pound fund to rearm the UK.
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Accusing Labour of failing to invest in the UK’s armed forces, the Conservative leader has proposed reallocating £17 billion to “accelerate” Britain’s “war readiness”.
She said: “We must ensure our armed forces are equipped and ready to defend our country, because defence of the realm must be the first priority of any government.”
The money includes £11 billion from the National Wealth Fund that is currently allocated to net zero projects, with the fund itself turned into a new National Defence and Resilience Bank.
Another £6 billion over three years would be taken from the Government’s research and development budget and given to the Ministry of Defence to invest in new technology.
Alongside investment from the private sector, the Tories said they expected their plan to mobilise £50 billion for defence.
Read more: Kemi Badenoch calls for Westminster councillors to be sanctioned over £27m 'catastrophic mess'
Shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge said the money would “deliver the drone revolution our armed forces require” and create a “more lethal” military.
As well as investing in UK defence firms, the money is expected to be used to build more resilient supply chains, reducing Britain’s reliance on “hostile states” such as China.
Labour has previously pledged to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from 2027 and to 3% by the end of the decade.And earlier this year, the Government launched UK Defence Innovation with a £400 million annual budget aimed at bringing new technology to the military.
But negotiations to join the EU’s 150 billion euro (£130 billion) defence fund broke down last month over the amount the UK was expected to pay to take part in the scheme.
And the Government is yet to set out how it intends to meet the 3% spending target, and the defence investment plan due to be published this autumn has been delayed, leading Mrs Badenoch to accuse ministers of “heel dragging and vague promises”.
Sir Keir Starmer told MPs on Monday the investment plan would be published “as soon as it’s ready”.Responding to the Conservative plans, a Labour Party spokesperson claimed the Tories were “gaslighting the British public on defence”.
They added: “These are yet more fantasy figures from a Conservative Party that cut defence by £12 billion in their first five years in power.
“Look at their record: their time in office starved our forces of funding, drove down morale and left Britain less safe. They did it before, and they’d do it again.
“With Labour, the UK armed forces will see a record £270 billion investment in this Parliament through our historic defence spending uplift.“
By 2027, we will spend 2.6% of GDP on defence by switching money from overseas aid, a level not seen since the last Labour government. That means no return to the hollowed out and underfunded armed forces we saw under the Tories.