Our security depends on cutting the deficit

WITH only a few days until the Chancellor’s spending review, the shrieking from the public sector about the impossibility of absorbing any more cuts grows more shrill.

Town halls say they will be unable to provide basic frontline services, despite the fact they are sitting on £22.5billion of reserves and admit some of their bosses are paid like footballers.

Meanwhile, the police are screeching loudest of all, even though crime is falling sharply and their budgets in England and Wales have risen by £1.5billion in real terms over the past 15 years.

Ex-Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair went so far as to suggest that people will die in a terrorist attack if community policing budgets are trimmed.

What these shroud wavers overlook, however, are figures published last Friday showing Britain has borrowed £54billion so far this year – adding to a national debt that already stands at £1.5trillion.

Eradicating the deficit is not an ideological choice, it is a moral and economic necessity if future generations are not to be saddled with unsustainable debt repayments.

Yesterday, George Osborne twice refused to say if – amid the anti-cuts furore – he might abandon plans for the country to be running a surplus (and therefore paying down its debts) by the end of the Parliament.

If he is wavering, he must stop. Britain’s future national security depends on him sticking to the course.