AceNewsDesk – Everyone”, lamented the late Anthony Eden, “is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.” The same is as accurate today as then:

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Mar.05: 2024: Conservative Home by Henry Hill Published: 05, 2024: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Conservatives talk a good game on tax cuts but seldom, as Liz Truss discovered, evince a matching enthusiasm for spending reductions; the left demands higher spending and yet higher, but rarely accompanies this with realistic proposals to raise the necessary revenue.

Instead, each side tends to take comfort in fantasies. For the right, the endless quest for savings from greater efficiency that voters won’t notice; for the left, a handful of bash-the-rich policies (VAT on school fees, scrapping non-dom status) whose dubious projected revenues are then spent, rhetorically at least, multiple times.

Ahead of tomorrow’s Budget, therefore, we decided to ask our panel about a trade-off between two issues dear to the Tory heart: defence spending and tax cuts. The result: three quarters of those we asked backed more cash for the military, and just over one fifth preferred no increase in the defence budget and more tax cuts.

Grant Shapps, who has been calling for military spending to rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP, can be pleased that his arguments have been cutting through with Conservative members.

Certainly, the sheer scale of the work required to make ready the United Kingdom for a potential confrontation with Russia would require a sea-change in how successive governments have approached the Armed Forces since the end of the Cold War.

A Treasury source quoted in the above-linked Daily Telegraph article said simply that:

“A strong Armed Forces requires a strong economy. We need to focus on economic growth so we can raise living standards and raise the revenue necessary to invest in our defence.”

Thus, military spending looks to be another one of those very important issues that will be dealt with later – presumably once the UK has strong per-capita GDP growth and has somehow resolved the ever-worsening challenge of meeting the state’s existing health, pensions, and welfare commitments in the face of an ageing population.

In other words, it will be dealt with in the long term – which, as I’ve noted before, never seems to actually arrive.

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