A new £1million war memorial to Muslims who lost their lives fighting for the UK in the two World wars will heal rifts in communities caused by the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and is not divisive, Jeremy Hunt has said.
The Chancellor told GB News that he had decided to spend public money on the memorial because it "was important to recognise the contribution of 170,000 Muslims who died defending our freedoms.
"We have already as a government supported a memorial to Sikh soldiers who died. We supported a memorial to Black and African soldiers who died in Windrush square in Brixton".
Asked of the money spent on the memorial would be "divisive", Hunt said: "No". He insisted that it would heal divisions in the UK caused by the loss of life in the fighting since Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel.
A new £1million war memorial to Muslims who lost their lives fighting for the UK in the two World wars will heal rifts in communities caused by the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and is not divisive, Jeremy Hunt has said
GBNEWS
Pointing out that he had given £7 million over three years to the Holocaust Education Trust in the Autumn statement, Hunt said: "It reminds us that on many things whether it's the Holocaust, whether it's the sacrifices made in the world wars or our freedom, we stand together as human beings and that was the purpose of that funding."
Elsewhere in the GB News interview in 11 Downing St on Thursday, Hunt said that while foreign workers would always have a role to play in the UK, the Government had to change the UK's economic model so that it does not rely on mass migration for growth.
He said: "We have to change our model, so that we are not relying on companies being able to expand by hiring more and more workers from overseas, because we've got 10 million adults of working age in this country who are not in work."
Hunt knocked back an idea by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in an interview earlier this week with GB News that companies which employ more Britons to pay less tax than those that rely on foreign labour.
He said: "There's always going to be a role for people with very particular skills that we don't have here. But we should be able to tap into the potential of the brilliant people that we have at home first and foremost."
Hunt hit back at claims by former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News this week that the Budget was not ambitious enough. "It's not 'Nickel and Diming' to cut National Insurance payments by one third," he said.
Hunt also insisted the Treasury was not over-attached to the forecasts of the Office for Budget Responsibility, as has been claimed by senior Tories including former Cabinet minister David Davis.
He said: "All the OBR does is it says independently is the government meeting its own fiscal rules. And so it’s doesn’t decide those fiscal rules, it just takes the rules that I decide and says if we're meeting them or not."
Also in the interview Hunt said that defence spending will have to go up after the Budget's "red book" said that capital spending will fall from £19.2billion to £18.9billion.
This itself was denied by sources close to Defence Secretary Grant Shapps who said that the red book "doesn’t include Ukraine, stockpiles, nuclear in there for 24/25" but had done for the previous year, so had pushed up spending by 0.9 per cent in real terms.
Hunt told GB News: "We will need to spend more on defence. The world is very volatile and dangerous". He added that "we want to increase it to 2.5 per cent of GDP as soon as it's economically possible to do so".