Military WILL get £52bn boost, vows Wallace
BRITaIn will increase its armed Forces spending by at least £52billion in response to Russian aggression, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said yesterday.
Mr Wallace confirmed that Liz Truss was sticking to her campaign promise of increasing defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP, which will take the annual budget to £100billion by 2030, a rise of £52billion.
He said the military was ‘actually going to grow’ as a result of what he called the huge increase, which he maintained had come after decades of ‘defending against cuts or reconciling cuts with modern fighting’.
Praising Mrs Truss for the extra funding, he hit out at Rishi Sunak, her opponent in the Tory leadership race, for failing to heed his requests for extra resources in the 2021 Integrated Review of defence and security when he was chancellor.
The Defence Secretary was re-appointed to the role when Miss Truss, whom he backed to take over at no 10, became Prime Minister.
‘The reason I supported Liz Truss was that the risks we were prepared to tolerate in the middle of the decade are not risks I want to tolerate any more in light of Russian aggression,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph. ‘There are certain risks we can’t really take anymore. and that’s why I wrote to the chancellor last March to say, the stuff that we didn’t get in the Integrated Review that we’d asked for, we do need it.’
Mr Wallace went on to caution that the West should not ‘underestimate Putin’ after his latest nuclear threats.
He said: ‘History is full of Russia being written off, and then Russia coming back. We take everything he does seriously, because this is a man without any scruples and any regard for international law.’
Miss Truss repeated her promise to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 to fellow world leaders at the Un in new York last week.