Priorities count
The Chancellor’s only mention of defence spending in his budget was that he would increase spending to 2.5% “when economic conditions allow”. Which rather misses the point as we need the higher defence spending now, and if it was a high enough priority it would be found somehow.
As the IFS’s Paul Johnson said, rather bluntly, Mr Hunt's promise was "not worth the paper it's written on unless accompanied by some sense of how it will be afforded".
After all as the IFS points out, the economic conditions are perfectly good enough to find £10 billion to cut National Insurance. That could and should have been used to improve our defence, instead it was used as a pre-election vote winning bribe.
As the Public Accounts Committee points out today, there is a £29 billion black hole in defence spending, the government doesn’t have a “credible plan” to fix that funding gap and this ”undermined” the credibility of Britain's armed forces.
Budgets are best tested after a few days when the dust has settled, the judgement on this one should be damning.
The conservative government has deliberately ignored a whole host of issues in order to find the money for tax cuts which do not even make up for the tax rises already in the system.
And we all know when they lose the next election and Labour has to find the money for the NHS, education, defence, local government and all the rest they will sneer and snipe from the opposition benches.
For the ability to do that they are willing to put our defence at risk during a European war.
Just think about that, on top of every other failure during the last 14 years, now they deliberately undermine our defence.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
I think there is another way to address defence spending which is to remove the capital cost of the current and new nuclear deterrent - Dreadnought - from the defence budget. The deterrent is not a defence asset it is a strategic national asset to try and give our failing governments international credibility. However it is a shibboleth. It must be funded and cost over runs means conventional forces (the ones that if funded would hopefully mean we never need a deterrent) are sacrificed to fund Dreadnought. Give the programme to the Treasury to manage, let’s see how they cope when they are required to actually manage something tangible. Of course this would also mean that our actual defence budget would slip underneath 2% of GDP.