Former NATO chief says 'pressure needs to be on the Chancellor' amid concerns over UK's defence spending

Speaking on LBC's Tonight with Andrew Marr, Lord George Robertson said the Chancellor "needs to know what she signed up for."

It comes after claims were made that the Government is failing to deliver on recommendations made by the recent Strategic Defence Review, which pledged to increase defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, but not until 2035.

When asked if he trusts Labour to "give defence the priority it needs" following last week's Budget, Lord Robertson said: "I think the pressure needs to be on the Chancellor.

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"She needs to know what she signed up to, because she signed up to the Strategic Defence Review.

"It's a government publication. She's going to have to recognise that that is a fact of life.

"The money will have to be made available in some way."

Vladimir Putin welcomed Donald Trump’s delegation to Moscow on Tuesday for the latest round of peace talks aimed at ending the Ukraine war.

But the president’s team left without a deal, as the Kremlin declared "the two sides were neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done."

A meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s aides and the same US delegates who visited Moscow was then also cancelled.

Lord Robertson, who served as Secretary General of NATO from 1999 to 2003, told Andrew that the defence review was designed to ensure the UK was "able to deal with the likes of Russia or China or any combination of our adversaries outside of there."

He said: "We're under prepared, not unprepared. We're underprepared at the present moment, but we're not under any serious conventional attack.

"It's going to be tricky, it's going to be difficult, but we have to live with that in order to get to the point where the Government will have to produce the money."

Ahead of peace talks with the US, Putin said: "We are not planning to go to war with Europe, but if Europe wants to and starts, we are ready right now."

Reacting to the developments, Lord Robertson said: "I don't trust him at all.

"I don't think he can be trusted because the speech that he made yesterday was genuine nuclear sabre raffling, which I think is profoundly unsatisfactory.

"I think that the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Iranians, who are in partnership with them, will be very worried about that kind of nonsense at the moment.

"He cannot beat NATO.

"NATO and the NATO countries are substantially more powerful than he is, even if he is destroying the Russian economy in order to be ready to fight that war in the future."

The ex-chief said Britain would need to rethink its position after Putin's threats.

"There are two ways in which people can be affected," he said.

"One is if there's a hot war and the head of the German intelligence service told the German parliament about how close that might be - and that's something we've got to really worry about, because Vladimir Putin is very, very irrational.

"But in the meantime, in the grey zone, the attacks that are taking place - cyber attacks, attacks on our undersea cables - all of these things can have an immediate effect.

"You know, the studio would go dark and so would most houses in the country if there was a major attack on our electricity supplies and our critical national infrastructure ahead.

"The country is on a knife edge.

"A couple of months ago, we saw in Spain and Portugal what happens, and we don't know what happened at that stage, but the lights went out, the traffic lights went out, the hospitals closed down."