‘ The next leader has to govern differently’

The Prime Minister’s resignation this week closes one chapter and opens another. Whoever succeeds him inherits the same in-tray, the same threats abroad and the same outdated question: what will you cut to pay for it?

Whoever takes the keys to Number 10 has to start challenging that question.

I spent twenty-four years in uniform before entering politics. I commanded men and women in combat. I buried friends, and stood beside families receiving the worst news imaginable. I did not leave the Marines and stand for Parliament to watch the country I served, the country I love, tell itself it cannot afford to be secure, healthy or growing. I resigned as Minister for the Armed Forces last week because I believe honesty now requires action.

The question is not what we cut to fund defence. The question is how we govern differently so that Britain becomes stronger on every front at once.

You do not transform a country through a single budget or spending review. You do it by creating visible successes, proving change is possible, and using each one to build the public confidence for the next. You treat the country as a system, not a set of departmental silos fighting over the same shrinking pot. You sequence.

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And the first step in that sequence is delivering for our young men and women. You can’t own the future without delivering for the young.

That’s why we should have a youth triple lock: a guaranteed offer of employment, education or training; a debt-to-deposit scheme that turns student loan repayments into a housing deposit; and free transport for under 25s.

By 2035, we consign the term NEET to history. Over a million are today. That is not a social problem waiting to be funded. It is a national emergency that is costing us more, every year we leave it, than fixing it would.

A Prevention Strategy for the NHS. Not another round of reductive talk about waiting lists, but a national objective to make Britain the healthiest country in Europe by 2035. Cancer survival rates at the top of the European table. Obesity coming down. Long-term sickness and economic inactivity falling. Every percentage point we shift is a percentage point back into a productive economy.

A Business and Enterprise roadmap. Britain should be the best place in Europe to start a company, scale a company and stay headquartered in one. Full stop. The answer to the Conservatives and Reform isn’t to match their rhetoric, it’s to build a country where British enterprise wins. A trillion pounds of growth is on the table over the next decade. Labour should go ahead and take it.

Security and Resilience, treated as one agenda, not five. Defence, energy, infrastructure, supply chains, economic resilience, considered in a single Cabinet conversation, rather than five departments fighting for funding while the threats compound.

And welfare reform is part of that national resilience program. Alan Milburn has put the cost of young people not in employment, education or training at £125 billion a year, a fraction of which would fund the defence uplift we are told is unaffordable. That is the stepping stone. Prove a mission works. Bank the saving. Reinvest it in the next one. Compound the gains.

The public, in my experience, are far ahead of Westminster on this.

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They understand spending when it has a measurable return. What they do not understand, and what they are right to be frustrated by, is a political class that tells them every year the country is too poor to be safe, too poor to be well, and too poor to grow, while taxes go up and services get worse.

The Labour Party I joined was hewn out of the mines of the north-east, hammered out of the shipyards of Govan, Liverpool and Belfast, and forged in the factories of the industrial revolution. Calloused hands and sore backs. But that tradition does not sit in a museum. It lives in the exhausted shift worker finishing a night on an A&E ward, the carer doing two jobs to keep a roof up, the warehouse picker, the plumber, electricians and builders, the bus driver, the single mother teaching in a school that cannot recruit. They did not build this party to manage British decline politely, and neither did the people who keep the country running now. They built it to make the country stronger, and to make sure the gains of that strength reached the people who did the work. That tradition is the reason I am writing this.

I know colleagues will be thinking about setting out their agendas. They should. But the conversation has to centre on national purpose.

What I learned in twenty-four years in uniform is this. Surround yourself with the best and listen to your team. Build a plan, test it, and then commit like your life depends on it. That is what we need to see over the next two years, to fight for our government, to fight for Labour, and to fight for every citizen in every part of this United Kingdom.

We can see the steps before us. Whoever takes the job next has to be brave enough to take the first one.

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