Very sensitive point I know but if we had not ring fenced such things as foreign aid to countries who’s leaders are amongst the wealthiest in the world.An dinstead of lending money to the banks HMG went and bought shares that are in some case worth less now than they were when they bought them so lik eothers HMG has to wait for bonus payouts on shares instead of getting the money back out of all the other money being used to pay bonus payments to bankers.So we seem to be in a decending spiral as far as spending on things we need like a sensible defence policy and spending.The MOD got severely slated last week for wasting money and not getting proper costings and budgets agreed for projects.Surely that should be a basic requirement ?,business has to do it or they can operate so how do the MOD mismanage so much ???
As I understand it the banks were backed, they weren’t given much “cash”. But with respect to aid, I think it should be exed completely, foreign aid is the domain of charities, not the domain of government.
Its hard for the MoD to get these proper costings in place, as the requirements and numbers are forever changing. Defence projects should be decided upon and funded, once that has happened, it must be impossible for said project to be removed/sold/cancelled until its out of service date, in order to protect the investment of the taxpayer. Post OSD, relative to storage costs, storage should also be considered for as long as a reasonable percentage of the item could be reasonably usable without expensive upgrade.
IMHO it would take some kind of total unmitigated disaster, one where the UK find itself powerless to respond, to make the politicos change their minds and start giving defence a prudent budget and capability.
Not that I want this to happen, but I think this is how bad it has gotten.
The Falklands and WW2 are both examples, and look how much we made our forces and our civilians suffer in those in terms of KSI due to lack of funding.
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