UK: Defense minister says fiscal statement will see if PM Rishi Sunak will retain defense spending pledge

British defense minister Ben Wallace said the people would have to wait until the fiscal statement from the government is released to see if Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has maintained his defense spending pledge. This comes as Sunak is looking over spending cuts and tax rises.

Speaking before a parliamentary committee Tuesday, Wallace was pressed on whether he was confident that Sunak and finance minister Jeremy Hunt would keep to the pledge of increasing defense spending by three percent of the GDP by 2030. Wallace said the fiscal statement Sunak and Hunt are set to release will see if the pledge would be kept.

“How fixed this new prime minister and the chancellor is going to be on three percent, we’ll find out at the budget,” said Wallace.

However, Wallace said he was confident that defense spending was becoming more of a priority but that the department’s budget was especially vulnerable to inflation with its large capital expenditure. Wallace also said he was looking to make sure that the defense ministry’s budget was protected on real terms and that it would be insulated from the impact of the exchange rates and inflation in the next two years.

“Obviously as Defense Secretary, I would like ‘by significant amounts,’ but I also live in the real world and the next two years there is a spending challenge we have to meet,” said Wallace.

This comes as Sunak and Hunt are looking over potential spending cuts and tax increases ahead of the fiscal statement this month, which would raise the possibility of a clash with the defense ministry. Sunak’s predecessors, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, have kept to the spending pledge, but he himself has not publicly said that he will keep it.

Meanwhile, interior minister Suella Braverman has come under fire for her comments on asylum seekers that enter the country on boats to cross the English Channel, describing the arrival of people seeking asylum in the country as an “invasion.”

Immigration minister Robert Jenrick who serves in Braverman’s ministry, said Braverman’s language reflected the scale of the challenge. However, Jenrick suggested that Braverman should have chosen her words “wisely.” Conservative lawmaker Roger Gale told The Times said Braverman was only playing to the right wing.