Defence spending is more important than foreign aid
IT’S not a competition but the two most irresponsible decisions taken by the coalition over the past five years have been its slashing of the defence budget and its inflating of aid. Defence spending will fall from its current level of more than 2 per cent of GDP to 1.8 per cent by 2017. The aid budget on the other hand is being increased so rapidly that officials are, according to a report last month, “struggling” to spend it. Last year alone it rose by 30 per cent.
On their own, both of these are foolish in the extreme. But the sheer madness of the coalition’s warped priorities is revealed by a study conducted by the House of Commons library this week. It shows that if current trends were to continue spending on aid would overtake the defence budget by 2030. Aid spending is projected by the study to reach £ 28.3billion by 2030 and defence spending to fall to just £ 27.1billion. It’s crazy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was fanciful talk of a “peace dividend”, as if the end of the USSR meant the end of serious threats to our defence. Since then the threat has certainly changed but far from disappearing it has if anything increased the need for defence. We now need to be able to counter not only conventional threats posed by the likes of Russia but also, quite possibly, China and the wholly new dangers posed by Islamic terror states.
EVEN within the five years the coalition has been in power the strategic outlook has changed. Syria, Yemen, Libya and Algeria are new areas of concern and Islamic State, which barely existed when the coalition took office, now controls vast swathes of the Middle East.
And the Russian invasion of Crimea, which appeared to take almost the entire defence establishment by surprise, has been accompanied by effective civil war in Ukraine. As a result, other eastern European nations are now nervous that they will be next to come under threat from President Vladimir Putin.
How will Nato ever hope to stand up to Russia if our armed forces are regarded even by our own Government as less important than aid agencies? And