Despite resigning as prime minister and leader of the Labour party on Monday, Keir Starmer is determined to publish the much-delayed defence investment plan (DIP) ahead of the Nato summit in Turkey on 7 July. Speaking at a conference in London yesterday, Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis confirmed that he was ‘working to finalise and publish the DIP before I travel to Ankara with the Prime Minister’ in less than a fortnight.
The fact that Starmer is still determined to publish the DIP is surprising. Most presumed after his resignation that the defence spending blueprint, along with any other unfinalised policies and projects, would be put on ice, ready for his successor – expected to be the former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham – to review, drop or push through. Government convention dictates that caretaker governments – as Starmer’s has become – must hold off from making any new spending commitments. Starmer is arguing that the DIP constitutes an existing spending commitment.
In his first address as Defence Secretary at the Rusi Land Warfare conference yesterday, Jarvis – who has been in the role for less than two weeks – insisted he had had ‘very good and constructive meetings’ with the Chancellor Rachel Reeves about getting the ‘best possible deal’ for defence spending. Jarvis’s predecessor John Healey resigned earlier this month, accusing Starmer and Reeves of putting together a DIP that ‘falls well short of what is required for defence’.
