Empty Defence Spending Promises Are A Shot In The Dark

30th April 2024

"The government's announcement was misleading and opaque and does nobody any favours." Paul Johnson writes for the Times.

Last week the prime minister committed to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2030. I got intensely irritated.

I'm neither a pacifist nor a peacenik. The world seems to be becoming a more dangerous place and more defence spending may well be appropriate. What annoyed me was not the commitment, either. It was all about the misleading and opaque way in which the additional spending was presented. When it wanted to make it look big, the government claimed it would boost spending by £75 billion; when it wanted to appear fiscally responsible, it claimed it would be cheap as chips, costing only £4.4 billion in 2028-29 and easily paid for by undoing some of the recent jump in civil service numbers.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or even the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to see that there might be something not quite consistent about these claims. Quite obviously, you can’t increase spending by £75 billion at a cost of £4.4 billion. What on earth is going on?

Read the full article HERE