The New Statesman.

Hello, I'm Hannah Barnes and this is Politics from the New Statesman, where every Thursday we bring you the latest from Westminster and beyond.

Today, I'm joined by our political editor, Andrew Marr, and our business editor, Will Dunn. Hello, both.

Hello. Hello.

Well, the big story this week is the announcement that Kier Stama has committed to raising defence spending.

He's promised it will reach 2.5% of GDP by 2027.

That's much earlier than thought.

And 3% in the next Parliament.

The overseas aid budget is going to be slashed to help pay for it.

Let's dive straight in. Andrew, you've written for the New Statesman magazine this week

that this will be a week remembered in history, quite some claim.

Why is it such an important crossroads?

We, like the rest of Europe, are facing a really, really dangerous period

when it looks like Trump is going to impose an unequal

and I think probably disastrous peace on Ukraine to end that war when Putin will feel emboldened

and when everybody has woken up to the fact that right across Western Europe we are poorly

defended and frankly the military in Britain is grotesquely underfunded.

Hollowed out, as has been said many times before. We don't have the army in the numbers to

send to help as defenders or peacekeepers of Ukraine in the future. We couldn't fight a proper war

for more than a few days. We don't have a missile defence. We don't have proper defence of the

undersea cables upon which our economy defence. All of those things have been true for a long

time. If you look at the graph of spending, it has been going down and down and down as a proportion

...