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Starmer making the world a more dangerous place, Abbott warns
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer leaves after delivering a statement on defence spending in the Downing Street Briefing Room, Westminster, February 25, 2025

KEIR STARMER is making the world a more dangerous place with his overseas aid cuts, leading left MP Diane Abbott told the Prime Minister today.

Ms Abbott raised Sir Keir’s savage spending reductions on international development to fund huge increases in the military budget during prime minister’s questions.

She challenged the premier to agree that “taking money from aid and development to spend on armaments and tanks makes people less safe, not more safe.”

That was because the “desperation and poverty that so often leads to warfare” is what aid and development money is supposed to counter, she told the Commons.

Sir Keir, however, reiterated his view that “security and defence is uppermost” in his considerations while hoping that overseas aid, now less than half its legally mandated 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product, would someday be restored.

The Prime Minister left Britain for a summit meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington shortly afterwards.

Tooting Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan urged Sir Keir to challenge the “extraordinary rhetoric coming out of Washington” when there, citing fascist salutes by some of the president’s supporters, and Mr Trump’s plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza among other outrages.

The Prime Minister did not indicate a readiness to do any such thing, instead reasserting his claim that Britain will act as a “bridge” between the US and Europe.

He praised British-Canadian relations, talking up the country which Mr Trump wants to make the 51st state of the US.

The Commons generally focused on support for militarism.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey urged the government to back a European Rearmament Bank and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt demanded a firm date for a further rise in military spending to 3 per cent of gross domestic product.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was only concerned lest some of the new military money be siphoned off to Mauritius as part of the Chagos Islands sovereignty deal, which Sir Keir declined to rule out.

On X, however, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that “the government has announced it will pay for more weapons and bombs by cutting support for the world’s poorest people,” calling it “a deplorable decision that will only create a more unstable and unequal world.”

“What is the government doing to bring about peace?” he asked.

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