Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has resigned as defence minister – just hours after John Healey resigned as defence secretary.
Al Carns, 46, former regular Royal Marines Officer and a current reserve officer, criticised the defence investment plan, saying the Prime Minister’s spending ‘isn’t enough’ and that he ‘wasn’t happy with the level of transformation in it’.
The MP for Birmingham Selly Oak wrote in a letter to Keir Starmer: ‘It has become clear to me that the change I had pushed for is not going to come. Given the situation, I have decided to resign as minister for the armed forces.
‘We face a more unstable and dangerous world than at any point in recent decades, and having spent most of my adult life in uniform, I understand what public service in such a moment demands.
‘It is for this very reason I cannot continue.’
He continued: ‘I cannot in good conscience stand at the dispatch box and defend a level of investment I know to be inadequate to the task.’
The Labour MP also criticised the Government’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, saying it ‘risks failing the very veterans it claims to protect’, implying that his suggested changes had been refused.
He wrote: ‘These two failures are the same failure. We ask soldiers to fight for this country. In return, we owe them the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it’s done. We are failing on both.’
Al Carns (pictured) resigned on Thursday evening after criticising the Government’s defence investment plan
Al Carns wrote a letter to the Prime Minister criticising his Defence Investment Plan, calling it ‘inadequate’
More widely, Al Carns criticised the Labour Government’s overall workings, writing: ‘The machinery of government itself has been left to decay. Decisions that should take days take months.
‘Departments fight each other instead of the problem. Officials and ministers who know the truth are not always rewarded for telling it.’
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He concluded: ‘I’ll keep fighting for the people I served with. I hope this government will too.’
Mr Carns’ resignation follows that of John Healey, Britain’s defence secretary, earlier today, after he accused the Prime Minister of failing to ‘defend the country’.
The defence secretary announced he was resigning with a brutal parting shot at the PM and Chancellor Rachel Reeves after months of bitter wrangling over military funding.
Mr Healey said he could not accept the settlement in the Defence Investment Plan because it fell ‘well short of what is required’ at a ‘dangerous time’.
He suggested the proposals would only boost military spending from 2.6 per cent of GDP next year to just 2.68 per cent in 2030, despite the ‘imperative to speed up readiness to fight’. That is equivalent to around £10billion extra, about a third of what had been pleaded for.
In Carns’ resignation letter to the PM, he also spoke of the UK not being able to keep up with the changing ‘character of conflict’, writing: ‘The character of conflict is changing faster than our procurement can keep up with’.
He said the defence investment plan ‘is not built for the threat we face’ and ‘is neither transformative enough nor sufficiently funded, adding: ‘We are asking our Armed Forces to operate in a more dangerous world on a budget written for a calmer one.
‘A strong country is not simply one with capable armed forces. It is one where working people feel economically secure, public services function, energy is resilient, communities are stable, and young people can see a future worth working towards.’
This is a breaking news story, more to follow.
