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Chris Mason: Why Labour are so keen to talk about defence

PA Media Keir Starmer vists Nato basePA Media

“There are two essential tests of trust: money and national security.”

I am chatting to a senior Labour figure about why they think shifting perceptions of the party’s attitude to defence is so important.

“If we don’t get those things right - economy and defence - why would people bother listening to us on anything else?”

In other words, Labour regard defence as a foundational issue.

Important, for its own sake, and, they conclude vital if they are going to win.

Arguably this has always been the case.

But Labour’s leadership team is acutely aware of it now more than ever, because of what came before: the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

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Take a look at this – Mr Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil on the BBC in 2017.

Labour gave the impression, overall, of being equivocal about the UK’s nuclear weapons.

Mr Corbyn was a longstanding opponent of them and was tied in knots in his interview about what a Labour government under his leadership would do about them.

So the current Labour leadership have been going out of their way to try to shift those perceptions.

More than two years ago, Sir Keir Starmer visited Nato headquarters in Brussels, and told the BBC that Jeremy Corbyn had been “wrong” about the defence alliance.

Mr Corbyn had long been a critic of the defence alliance, although pulling out of it was never Labour policy when he was leader.

Sir Keir emphasised then that Labour’s commitment to Nato was “unshakeable.”

A month later the Labour leader met Nato troops in Estonia.

He was back there again just before Christmas last year.

Since then, Labour and the Conservatives have been tussling over who can be trusted to fund our armed forces properly.

In mid April, on a trip to the BAE Systems factory in Barrow in Furness in Cumbria, where the UK’s nuclear submarines are built, Keir Starmer promised to spend 2.5% of national income on defence “as soon as resources allow”.

At the end of April, when the prospect of a summer election will have been swimming around the mind of the prime minister, I reported on his visit to Warsaw and Berlin to talk about defence – and commit to spending 2.5% of national income on it by 2030.

That promise outflanked the Labour Party, because it put a timeframe on the promise.

Which brings us to this campaign, and Labour’s determination to project a commitment to the military, in the backdrops the party chooses, the candidates it selects and the language it uses.

They are talking up the fact that they have 14 ex-military personnel standing for them at this election.

The challenge they face is whether people believe this political leopard really has changed its spots.

Take nuclear weapons.

Just eight years ago under Jeremy Corbyn, around a dozen Labour figures who are now frontbenchers under Keir Starmer voted in the Commons against maintaining the UK’s nuclear weapons.

Among them, the man who could be foreign secretary next month, David Lammy and the woman who could be deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner.

Plenty more abstained.

It suggests, in their heart of hearts, there are figures who could soon be hugely influential in government, if Labour win, who are at best equivocal or uncomfortable about the UK’s nuclear arsenal, however committed to it they now claim to be.

And, with budgets likely to be tight, whoever wins the election, funding the military in a way deemed adequate will come with trade-offs elsewhere.