This is right on the money. Rebuilding hard power, British industrial base as national security, foreign policy and domestic resilience treated as one strategic question rather than different departmental fights. This is the direction the country needs. It's the argument I've been making for weeks and I'm fully behind it.

We can't keep pretending a defence budget is the same as a national security plan. It just isn't. The DIP avoids areas that actually decide whether this country is secure or not. Critical National Technologies. We rightly treat power stations, pipelines and telecoms as critical national infrastructure. We do not yet treat nuclear, advanced manufacturing, AI, sovereign compute, semiconductors, data and quantum the same way. That is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making. Germany is building a sovereign AI and compute stack alongside its industrial strategy. France has a 2030 strategy. The Americans and the Chinese are running national industrial mobilisations we haven't seen since the Cold War. Britain is inventing brilliant things, but then letting other people build them, own them and then decide what happens with them. Data is the new gunpowder. Right now we don't have a national plan to make it, own it or protect it at the scale that truly matters. Create a Critical National Technology Category. Give those companies privileges and benefits, in exchange for their support towards national security. If we don't create, scale and support the technologies of the future, we become vulnerable to others that will. Home defence and national resilience. Sweden sends every household a "If Crisis or War Comes" pamphlet. Finland runs its Comprehensive Security Model that plans, in advance, for national mobilisation across every ministry and every sector. Germany is standing up civil defence, bunker capacity and reserve infrastructure that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Britain has nothing comparable. Build the plan now, build the resilience, integrate it across every level of government. Ask yourself the real questions… What happens at the next Covid? The next cyber attack that shuts down a factory or an entire NHS trust? The next energy shock? A coordinated hybrid campaign against our grid, our supply chains, our food, our water? Who is in charge? What do businesses do? What are the Reserves for? What should the public do? What do you need to do? Prior planning prevents piss poor performance. We do not have serious answers to any of that. The state should. The next generation. The country that produces the next generation of engineers, scientists, cyber operators, service personnel and grafters wins the next thirty years. The country that doesn't, doesn't. Right now we are the country that doesn't. A guaranteed offer of employment, education or training. Not a scheme, not a pilot, a promise every young person in this country will get when they leave school. A debt-to-deposit scheme that turns student loan repayments into a housing deposit. If you're working hard, if you're paying your way, the state should be helping you build your life up, not just taking more and more from it. Free transport for under 25s. Because opportunity means being able to physically get to it, and right now we're pricing young people out of the jobs. A cultural change that puts as much emphasis into master tradesmen and women as it does masters degrees. Why do we have student loans when we don't provide equivalent financial support for apprenticeships? We support education but we don't support education in work. Talent is everywhere in this country. Opportunity isn't. Fix that and you fix half of everything else. Service. Britain used to understand service. Not as a slogan on posters but as a habit. Something you did because you were part of something bigger than yourself, matched with the country doing something for you in return. We've lost some of that. Volunteers hold this country together. I don't just mean the ones in the headlines. The ones doing the litter picks, running the youth clubs, driving the community bus, keeping the church hall open, running the food bank. They are the quiet infrastructure of every place I've ever lived, from Aberdeen to Selly Oak. Without them, half the country would seize up in a week.