Afternoon all,
It will be brief this one, as I really should be writing, but can I point people towards the debate raging at John Redwood's blog (http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/) over defence spending?
The Government tells us that serious cuts are going to have to be made to public spending. Now, I think I'm right in saying that the largest single outlay for any administration nowadays is health and social services. There are substantial costs involved in defence spending though. At the moment the Government is committed to renewing Trident and building two aircraft carriers that will be considerably bigger than the ones we currently operate, along with multiple other defence procurement projects (not counting the questions over our withdrawal from Afghanistan).
I don't agree with elements of what Redwood writes (I think he's wrong on why we might need to keep troops in Germany), but at least there's a debate occurring there. In my humble opinion, the announcement the other day that the renewal of Trident will have to come out of the MoD's budget was one of the most important defence decisions this country has made for some time*, and I can't remember it being comprehensively discussed.
* Not all defence spending comes out of the MoD budget; a large amount of our spending on Afghanistan for instance is paid for out of Treasury contingency funds. Now if the Treasury is going to insist on the MoD paying for Trident, that's going to create huge financial waves within that department - the cost of renewing our nuclear defence runs into the billions of pounds.
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