Sunday shows round-up: ‘No peace without European partners’

Jonathan Reynolds: ‘There will be no durable peace [in Ukraine] without European partners’

Keir Starmer will meet European leaders at an emergency summit in Paris next week, after Trump appeared to be sidelining Europe in the Ukraine peace negotiations. On the BBC, Victoria Derbyshire asked Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds why Starmer had called this a ‘once in a generation moment for our national security’. Reynolds said that ‘we should welcome the fact that the US president wants to see an end to the conflict’, but added that the peace process has to include European partners, ‘particularly the Ukrainians’. Reynolds suggested that ‘there is a reasonability’ to the US’s desire for Europe to contribute more to its own defence, and that there was no ‘fundamental breach’ between the US and its European allies. 

Reynolds disagrees with US Vice President Vance over free speech claims

In a speech which shocked attendees at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of ‘retreating from some of its most fundamental values’, and argued that free speech was under threat in the UK, by referencing the arrest of a man who prayed in the safe zone around an abortion clinic.