Spending restraint in precisely the wrong place

Carol-Ann

Can someone please explain why International Development has been protected. Labour have increased overseas aid massively over the last 12 years. That is the department that needs drstic cuts NOT and I repeat NOT the Armed Forces. If Cameron does not scrap this policy it's going to be another grammar school situation.

Stan, UK

If Cameron thinks that grassroots Tories are going to campaign to get a Tory government elected so they can increase AID and cut defence, he's very much mistaken. Thatcher did exactly the opposite. She cut AID and increased defence spending!

Anthony

There's a very strong case that defence spending should go up. However, if it isn't going to - and as far as I can tell it almost certainly isn't - the debate surely has to be around how the current pie is distributed. Lord Guthrie seemed to make this argument in his recent HardTalk interview.

Of course, by making a firm committment to both Trident and the carrier programme, it seems to me that the Conservative Party has already limited its room for manoeuvre.

Now, in the abstract I think both Trident and the carriers are eminently justifiable. Perfectly sound arguments for both. But ultimately the old thing of "to govern is to choose" is going to bite Tory defence policy in the bum, I'm afraid. Not, I hasten to add, that it could be any worse than what we've got already.

mac

James,

Lansley's Today interview clearly implied that Defence spending will be cut, since only Health, Education and (inexplicably) "International Development" are sacrosant.

That can only mean a reappraisal of Trident and the cancellation of the carriers - and probably several of the Type 45 destroyers, too - since we are now saddled with paying for an unnecessarily large number of Typhoons, many of which will go straight into deep storage, of course.

The one ship Navy and a Gendarmerie-only Army beckons to defend the realm and support future British foreign policy . . . But hey, there'll still be money to aid development in China and India, won't there?

This is Blue Labour writ depressingly large.

And, meanwhile, Brown-the-British-patriot shows his contempt for the Chiefs of Staff by inflicting the bovine Ainsworth on them.

nigel

No chance of the Tories increasing defence spending. Week in week out Gordon Brown hammers Cameron on his lack of policies. This is yet another example of a man who thinks he can gain power by remaining silent.

Give me Norman Tebbit any day of the week, a proper conservative, without apology.

BTW I worked for Butler in the dim and distant past, he is a superb officer, a huge loss to UKAF.

David

Sorry, but if we can't afford the wars, we have to withdraw, rather than increase spending with money we don't have.

Chuck Unsworth

@ James,

Why do you regard deploying troops to Afghanistan as wise? What is the mission there? And what will be the measure of success?

wonderfulforhisage

What sort of moral compass allows this? And the PLP banged their desk lids and cheered. And the public are more interested in 'The Apprentice' and 'Britain's got Talent'.

The Country has been ruined by forty years of dumbed down education that has destroyed the public's critical facilties.

George Orwell didn't write novels, he wrote history ahead of time.

DavefromLuton

You missed this bit
'He said that a strong secretary of state was needed to ensure that everyone co-operated, and praised John Reid, who was Defence Secretary in 2006, for “knocking heads together”. “It needs someone with clout back home.'
I wonder what Brigadier Butler thinks about getting Bob Ainsworth. I'm surprised so little has been made of Bob's appointment. An absolute insult to our armed forces

Jeremy

"...if the Tories are to make one commitment to increase spending it should be on defence."

In the light of your argument, yes. And I would also like to think that a Tory government will re-form all of the historic regiments - like the Black Watch - which have been disbanded under Labour.

Will Yoxall

I entirely concur, the one area that needs a real boost is Defence - there are saving within the MoD which can be made and the cash reinvested but one reason (among many) that the MoD has made a mess of procurement is that it hasn't been given enough cash in the first place, leading to delays and extra expenditure.

It's not just the Army that has a problem of course, at one point 70% of the personnel in Afghanistan came from the Royal Navy (including the Royal Marines). Having said that the Navy's more conventional operations have also suffered since 1997 with 12 frigates and destroyers having been cut as well as 4 SSNs.

Our Armed Forces are being asked to do too much with too little - and that is a problem not just for the Army, and not just in Afghanistan but across the board. I don't particularly want to see Britain shrink from the world stage so I think its time we stopped taking money from the Armed Forces to pay for other things and upped the Defence budget by a significant amount - say to 3% of GDP, an increase of 40% or so.

Over the period of the Labour Government just about every department apart from the MoD has had significant budget increases, meanwhile personnel and material numbers in the Armed Forces have suffered deep cuts, it everybody else’s turn to face cuts to pay down our debts, the one area which should be ring fenced is Defence.

Stronghold Barricades

Lets put Brown up there with his defective ammunition and only a bayonet to save himself

I'm sure that the MoD would allow him to take one for the team

bernerlap

We need to dramatically increase Defence expenditure - we could do it by cutting the Overseas aide budget and freezing recruitment in all non-essential areas of the civil service and by putting the pay of every civil servant earning more than £50000 per year.

pat mcgroin

surely the whole afghanistan budget for the troops can come out of the international development fund as they are trying to build a new nation. it may look like the mod are not getting any extra cash, they would be still getting it and they could say that they haven't cut the international development budget. so everyone wins. troops get the stuff they need and they still look good for helping other countries!

Voice of Reason

There are two real issues here.

Fighting two wars on a peacetime budget and the utterly chaotic and incompetant procurement process for any piece of kit we buy for the forces. Sort the second one out and you can get away with a little bit of a budget drop.

Vulture

Liebour have never understood defence. Never have. Never will. Their whole ethos from the 1930s onwards is that in a world of brotherly love we don't need any armed forces.
Ainsworth is bad - but at least he looks like a NAAFI corporal. That dimwit they had before Hutton - Des someone -looked like a Tesco trolley supervisor.