afternoon. the spokesperson this afternoon. the spokesperson said that both men agreed on their joint said that both men agreed on theirjoint ambition said that both men agreed on their joint ambition to strengthen the close and historic relationship between the uk and the us. sir keir starmer and mr trump reiterated the need for allies to stand together with ukraine in the face of russian aggression. the prime minister also underscored the importance of securing peace in the middle east. the downing street spokesperson shared that the two men looked forward to seeing one another at the earliest opportunity. pleas of not guilty have been entered on behalf of axel rudakubana valdo calocane after he failed to reply when arraigned at liverpool crown court on three counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder following the deaths of three young girls in a knife attack at a taylor swift themed dance class in southport. rita cabana appeared via video link in court as pleas of not guilty were entered to all 16 counts on the indictment. it comes as a police report published today found that officers were unprepared for the scale of the summer riots, which

followed the southport attacks. the report also found that there were gaps in intelligence linked to social media and the dark web. in the lead up to the riots. the leader of the opposition, kemi badenoch, has accused the prime minister of playing politics with the waspi women. the prime minister is now facing pressure to give mps a vote on his government's decision to rule out compensation for women affected by changes to the state pension age. here's what sir keir starmer had to say at prime minister's questions earlier on. >> it is a serious issue. it's a complex issue. the research, as he knows, shows that 90% of those impacted knew about the changes that were taking place. and i'm afraid to say, the taxpayers simply can't afford the tens of billions of pounds in compensation when the evidence does show that 90% of those impacted did know about it, that's because of the state of our economy. >> uk inflation has risen to its highest level since march,

according to official figures. the office for national statistics said inflation rose to 2.6% in november, up from 2.3% the previous month. that is the highest rate since march and the highest rate since march and the second rise in two months. the figures come ahead of the bank of england's latest decision decision on interest rates tomorrow. the ons chief economist said the drive was dnven economist said the drive was driven by an increase in petrol prices. those are the latest gb news headlines for now. let's go back to nigel for the very latest gb news direct to your smartphone. >> sign up to news alerts by scanning the qr code or go to gbnews.com/alerts. >> good evening. it's the subject that won't go away. it is the giving away of the sovereignty of the chagos islands to mauritius. this came

as an absolute bolt from the blue. nobody expected it. the government say they have to do this because the international criminal court has said the islands ought to go to mauritius. but mauritius has never had sovereignty over the chagos islands at any point in history. and it was only an advisory ruling. so the arguments go back and forth. the government keeps telling us that the american administration are fully in favour of this deal, because the 99 year lease on diego garcia, an essential and essential military base, is something the americans are happy with. two days ago, i was in a very full mar—a—lago. let me tell you, every single american official i spoke to was deeply worried about this because just think about it. we had a 50 year deal with china over hong kong that they would maintain their democratic independence, and that's disappeared already. but no, the government insists that the americans support it. i know

damn well that the incoming trump one won't. but the one thing that really interests me is the government say, but don't worry, the sovereignty of the falkland islands and the sovereignty of gibraltar are not under threat because it's for the people that live in the falklands and on the rock of gibraltar. it's for them to decide their fate. so i put this suggestion to the house of commons earlier on today. can we please, if we respect the sovereignty of gibraltar and the falkland islands on the basis it's what the people want.7 can we have a referendum of all of the eligible chagossians and let them decide what the future sovereignty of the chagos islands is.7 that sovereignty of the chagos islands is? that surely is the only fair solution that is going. >> mr speaker, we've been very clear that these were negotiations between the united kingdom and mauritius, and i have set out in the past the reasons for that. the interests of the chagos islands are absolutely at the heart of this

agreement. as i said, i have repeatedly engaged with them. and i do find, mr speaker, the hon. gentleman continues to speculate with the greatest respect. he does not know the detail of what is agreed. he does not know the detail that has been shared. he does not know. mr speaker, the detail that the national security apparatus of the united states has considered. and i am confident that, mr speaker, that he would have his concerns allayed when he sees the detail of this deal. >> doctor andrew morris well, the idea that the chagossians have actually really been consulted at all is for the birds we've had previously on this show, the leader of their community at several thousand strong. fascinatingly, many of them still live in crawley, right next to the airport at gatwick, because they actually want to go back to the islands. but in previous times they've been treated pretty badly by the mauritians, mostly on the grounds of race. i'm joined in the studio by lloyd russell—moyle, former labour mp, and kwasi kwarteng, former tory mp and chancellor lloyd. this is

one. i mean, jeremy corbyn, for example, has been campaigning for decades on behalf of the chagossian community and they got a pretty rotten deal of it back in 1968 being taken off the islands. and what they say is they accept diego garcia, but they accept diego garcia, but they want to be able to settle on the neighbouring islands, and that's right and fair and proper. and we would be sort of undoing a terrible injustice on them. the ones i've spoken to. and the impression i get is that overwhelmingly they'd rather be under british sovereignty than mauritian sovereignty. but what about my idea of having referendum? >> well, i think your ideas are rather superb. one, actually. good lord, it can't be this agreement. usually. i'm usually very sceptical about referendums because we saw how awfully. oh, you don't like the result of the last one, do you? no, i know manipulator. they can be. but i do think we have a principle in this country that we don't do anything without the representation of those peoples. and i do think that it sends a difficult decision, a difficult

precedent for other areas. this argument that stephen, who is a very good friend of mine, gives where he says we have negotiated on the best interests of the chagossians. there used to be a phrase nothing without us, nothing about us, without us. and i'm afraid this doesn't pass that test. >> so he knows what's best for the chagossians is sort of the implication, quasi that we got there. so i think what's interesting about this is clearly there's this is the administrative state, the blob, you know, the kind of the secret people who really control everything. >> so what i think happened, not in any spirit of conspiracy theory, is that the foreign office took a view under the conservatives, originally under the conservatives, they would have presented. and this is what they do to ministers. you have a, b, c they always present three choices, and the middle one is always the one they want to guide you to. and clearly they took a view that this is they took a view that this is the best deal they would have given alternatives, i.e. we keep them forever. but that's too reactionary, that's too imperialist. and then there

would have been, you know, we give them immediately. so you can't do that because that's too much. >> so look at this. wonderful. look at this. >> that's what would have happened. it's called a fudge. the relevant minister would have waved it through. and then when the new government came in, they would have been presented exactly the same thing. and the minister, whatever he said, they'd have said, well, the tories agreed to this and the labour minister would be like, well, it's got to be okay. >> and james cleverly was in negotiations. >> he was. and that was, that was something that, you know, he's a he's a very he's a good friend of mine. but he probably went perhaps with official advice. and that's why we've got in the mess. now the reason why this has become a difficult issue, not only because of the change of government in mauritius, but as you've alluded to, the change of administration in the us. and clearly, i think with the biden a slightly more left, perhaps a bit more anti—imperialistic and all of that sort of thing work, they would have they would have said, look, you know, let's just hand them over and we can do a deal on the lease of the air base. >> many people on the left would say that the biden

administration was anything but anti—imperialistic. >> yeah, but but for them, you know, they're wearing their virtue, you know, very publicly on this. and i think with with trump coming in, it'll be a totally different view. yeah. that's right. and that's what's upended with 32 days away, let alone the change of government that has occurred in mauritius. >> in mauritius, that's exactly where the previous prime minister didn't win a single. he went from 60 seats on first preferences down to zero. i the whole thing is unbelievable. >> the whole thing has been upended. and i'm afraid the bureaucratic state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, the administrative state, i think has got slightly going forward. >> rather than just looking back, i actually think there's a real opportunity now. there's an opportunity for the british government to say, look, the mauritians are wanting to backtrack on this deal. that means that we'll have to go back to the drawing board, because you can't just tweak the deal and say it's all if you if you don't, it's either all of it or none of it. they want none of it. now i think they're going to finish. so therefore we need to go and they're going to finish up looking silly. >> but this principle of sovereignty, the sovereignty of

the overseas territories is up to is up to the populations. let's ask them. >> but if the mauritian government hadn't changed and trump hadn't won, they would have done this deal. and we saw jonathan powell. you know, he's been running around, you know, doing sort of shuttle diplomacy, trying to get this thing over the line before president trump takes office. >> yeah. it's not going to work now waspi women, this has been a campaign that has gone on for many, many years. as you know, the pension age for women was 60. it was increased to 65. arguably, that should have been done actually decades ago. but a lot of women have been caught in the middle of all of this. but in 2022, keir starmer appeared being photographed with a couple of waspi women campaigner, saying we the labour party, if we win government are going to sort this problem out for you. there he is on your screens now. liz kendall, another frontbencher, been a long term campaigner but now they come into office. it's all very different and he was asked several questions today about the waspi women by the leader of the waspi women by the leader of the opposition, kemi badenoch, and with even more vigour by

certain labour backbenchers. this is what he had to say. >> it is a serious issue. it's a complex issue. the research, as he knows, shows that 90% of those impacted knew about the changes that were taking place. and i'm afraid to say, the taxpayers simply can't afford the tens of billions of pounds in compensation when the evidence does show that 90% of those impacted did know about it. that's because of the state of our economy. >> what the prime minister said there, lloyd, might be quite logical in terms of public finances and where we are, and that warnings were given, but it still doesn't look good, does it? when you campaign for office on a whole series of promises, and then it seems they're breaking one after another after another in very quick succession, not doing them much good, is it? >> well, i think to be fair, the economy is much worse than they thought in 2022, which is when most of those pledges were signed. the those two years in

between the economy, you know, we've had liz truss, we had the that was two years ago. admittedly we had all of that. that has changed the thing. so pledges that were made three years ago of course, can't necessarily be treated as pledges now. however, i actually do agree with you that it doesn't look particularly good to do this, and you could quite actually, another way of thinking about this is that most of those waspi women who are still in work will be paying a tax bill of far in excess of that, and they wouldn't have been because they would have been because they would have been retired early. you could say we will give them a tax rebate of 500,000. and you would, you would. >> i think you're being very clever. >> kwasi and over kwasi kwarteng when you were in government, we said, no, you obviously you put it into the long grass. >> no, no. so you could have responded to the hsi report, but you didn't. >> as a constituency mp, i was lobbied on this regularly. sure. and i held the line. i said, we can't afford to pay. we had the same line as the prime minister

used that. 90% of them knew. i mean, this was an act that was published in 95. i know the act was passed in 95, and that was that was very clear. >> no one's disputing the 95. no, no, no, no it's not no 95 moving into the slow taper. there's no accusation that that was mal administration. the problem is when the coalition government came in, your government came in, your government with the liberals came in. what they did is they accelerated it. they doubled up the speed, and it was the doubung the speed, and it was the doubling up of the speed that has left people saying, well, i planned what you told me originally and i couldn't then plan for later. >> you know, you're very sophisticated argument. i accept that you're some of your points, but the nub of this is that rachel reeves, liz kendall, keir starmer all campaigned on the fact that they were going to they were going to help them. they were bashing the government with this. and the idea that they didn't know how much it would cost, they didn't know, you know, what the pressure on pubuc you know, what the pressure on public finances were and that they could pretend, which is

what they did. i mean, people would say they lied, but they pretended that they were backing these women. and then within five months of government, they say, okay, even if we can't support you, we don't have the money. >> even if the economy looks worse, one could also argue they're talking the economy down themselves. >> of course they are. we could. of course they are. well, i tell you what. they had enough money for. >> the one thing guys i saw at mar—a—lago were flying in from all over the world. some of the biggest entrepreneurs and tech bosses in the world. and the mood, the bullishness, the optimism. and compared with the doom and gloom and misery here, there's quite a contrast. we're drawing stumps on it in a minute okay. we're going to discuss >> your debate.

>> let's talk defence spending andindeed >> let's talk defence spending and indeed global strategy. i'm delighted to be joined by robert fox, defence editor from the evening standard, plus my panel who are still here. they haven't

punched each other. it's fine. robert, let's begin with diego garcia and chagos, the subject that i've been talking a lot about. are we about to make a very big mistake? >> i think so, i think we're in trouble. a governor of the chagos islands years ago, i think centuries ago. been there for two centuries. once called it fantasy island. i said it looks like treasure island for tiktok, but it's now turned into the nightmare for christmas. for starmer, it's going to require diplomacy. it's going to require real security thinking, and it's going to require an application of the law and the norms of law and how they can be adapted for the modern world. because i picked up a lot of your discussion before, when you look at gibraltar, when you look at the falklands, nigel, you are absolutely right, because in the day, during a searing experience of the of the late unpleasantness, i remember around 1982 and the argentines came up with the proximity

argument over again and again and again. and if starmer gets this wrong, all that could blow up all over again. and we know we can see how it's dormant, but it's semifreddo as a conflict now are argentina and the falklands. but we will have real problems over gibraltar. but with the new dimensions of warfare to we have to think very seriously about the value of these remote outposts like guam, as well as diego garcia. and remember that we've forgotten it since 1982, ascension island. >> that's right. no, no, no. >> that's right. no, no, no. >> can i just chip in on that? i mean, we talk about the falklands, and you've got to remember, i mean, as you know, people have looked at the evidence, the foreign office record, there was a movement within the bureaucracy that wanted to hand it over to argentina even then. condominium. that's right. condominium. that's right. condominium. it was going to be a shared status, much like sudan had been back in the day before

independence. and so, you know, you've always got that element of the bureaucracy that is willing or rather open. >> i think the foreign office has seemed to be ashamed of our past. >> well, yeah, i mean, you could it's also because, of course, none of them elect mps. >> it'sjust none of them elect mps. >> it's just a none of them elect mps. >> it'sjust a foreign none of them elect mps. >> it's just a foreign office plaything, and they think they can just play with it without actually considering strategic or actually. >> well, the sadness, the sadnessis >> well, the sadness, the sadness is we didn't in the 50s do what the french did and give these places representation in parliament. and that's maybe an old we never did that argument. i want to talk about starmer. he says we will get to 2.5% on defence spending, but he's not sure when this year, next year sometime. >> never. >> never. >> yeah, he said on 3% he said we need to prioritise working collectively now. that's a phrase that i heard in my years in brussels, that one of the beauties we were told by jean—claude juncker of a european defence union, a european defence union, a european army, if you want to call it that, was we wouldn't need to spend 2% on defence. we could all spend 1% on defence and benefit by working collectively. and starmer is doing two things at the same time. he's going to estonia,

he's talking about nato, he's talking to donald trump, and trump's going to be here maybe in february or starmer, they're talking about this. but at the same time in the last week, he's made it very, very clear he wants us to be much closer to the european defence union. what is i mean, it seems to me, robert, to begin, it's quite difficult to do nato and the european defence union. there's a potential conflict. where is starmer really on defence? >> well, i don't know. and that's what worries me because they seem to be all over the place because i will go further up the line. the great thing, one of the great the 17 big reports and inquiries was the sdr, which was to shape modern forces for modern contingencies forces for modern contingencies for modern times and above all, security and resilience at home. rachel, from accounts, has got hold of it, and they have been told i'm getting this from people involved in the inquiry. no, you've got no money, you've got no money. you may even have less money, is the implication to some of them. so it's a cost

cutting exercise. i think that the three principles in the sdr are not very pleased about that, because that was not the original original remit. let's start for that. from that , go on start for that. from that, go on to your very good question about zara aleena and what starmer said. the european union before it was the european union attempted defence. do you remember the western european union, the eu, which was really a feeble offspring. and as long as you had a cold war and serious confrontation, and don't we still have that? we have it in a very different form now. nato had to take the lead. nato will have to take the lead anyway. and somebody must be telling starmer that you've got to set your priorities in order. nato has operational planning to a degree that there's no possibility of getting it out of the eu. it's done in mods and then at the lower operational level, you have two basic hubs and traditions, one very hollowed out, but it's the brits and the french. if you're going

to have to project force, the utility of force, as our best general of the last 40 years, rupert. rupert rupert smith would say in his famous book, you have got to have credible projection of power when we're sending tanks up to the tank ranges at castlemartin with no ammunition for their main guns or no allowance for ammunition for their main guns. as rupert smith said to me the other day, we haven't got a proper army. >> i mean, that is that is i mean, quasi. you guys were in charge for 14 years. historically, we've always thought, perhaps wrongly, that the conservative party was stronger on defence than labour. from everything we're being told by robert, who knows who does know his onions. it was so shocking. state of affairs. >> the initial problem we had was coming in in 2010. we had that huge budget deficit and george osborne, the then chancellor, decided that, you know, he had to balance the books or attempt to balance the books or attempt to balance the books in some way. and i'm afraid as a result of that, the defence budget got quite

severely hit. >> i mean, and they made choices and as it turned out, not terribly good ones. that's right. >> and i think that was the original problem we had dealing with the deficit. and i think his view privately expressed was that there wasn't there weren't much votes, there weren't many votes in defence. i think that was the i think that's a terrible mistake. >> and i think the present government is making the same mistake. >> and i think they're making exactly the same mistake as we did initially. and i think the main problem they have is that there is no money. so they're in a position, but it's all about priorities. >> if you look at the army's offer on that thing and say what you do, how many people are involved, get their money, generate wealth for this country connected with the army and the armed forces. huge numbers. it's about it's about half a million families. >> no that's true. >> no that's true. >> but if you look at the not looking at it in, one of the issues with the mod is that there was a huge amount of bureaucracy. >> i mean, there's some brilliant civil servants there. yes, but there were tons and tons of them. and i remember looking at the numbers, you

didn't just go after the bureaucracy. >> i mean, even as late as even as late as 2017, you were cutting the numbers in the standing army and replacing them with reserves. and they do a very good job reserves, but they aren't a replacement for full time people that go through the ranks. and we now are at a situation where britain is one of the least contributors of personnel to peacekeeping missions around the world, and that i think so giles so far. >> but rather than going back, i mean, we've had a look, we've had a look at the bannau, we've had a look at the bannau, we've had a look back and absolutely right. but i mean, i very much take the view and i think robert agrees with me. we really don't know where starmer actually stands on this. that's true. >> it's very woolly, not setting despite what they said in the in the campaign and the manifesto, they're not setting defence. and most people in defence would like to change the name to resilient security. that's right. i mean, this is the domestic production of food and energy, the kinds of things we would say is not related to security. it absolutely is core. it's a much wider. it's a priority. this government, i feel, is not setting a priority on this. >> i think that's totally unfair. we have got a clear

pledge to up the spending, which has not happened before. even though the finances are tight, there is a clear pledge to invest in new equipment and new developments. and this this concept that you're saying, is it nato versus europe? i don't think it is nato versus europe. i think clearly nato is going to be the main player, but with a changing trump and with europe on the other side, what britain needs to do is play its traditional role as the bridge. and actually i think starmer well, i agree with that. >> why is it so? why is it that when starmer was asked yesterday, starmer was asked yesterday, starmer was asked yesterday, would you tell other european countries to spend their 2%. he said, oh no, i don't want to tell other countries what to do. surely thatis countries what to do. surely that is our role. we are the bridge. we need to be the voice saying to europe, pay us well. look, in reality, it's not just about the money, it's about the commitment. please, no. >> the meeting at tallinn, this is where i disagree with it 4541 00:26:53,576 --> 00:2