The Russians are coming. The terrorists are at the door. Feel afraid, feel very afraid. Give us the money.
Every year at budget time, the defence lobby waves shrouds and howls blue murder. With yet another defence review in the offing, the army fears it will lose thousands of soldiers, while the navy and the Royal Air Force fear the (long overdue) merger of the paratroop and marine brigades and the loss of more frigates.
Britain’s defence budget is one of the largest in proportion to population in the world, the largest in the EU and the second largest in Nato. This is unrelated to threat and entirely related to history. That is why each year no one asks what the nation needs, only whether it can “do with” less than the year before.
The British government is projected to spend £1.9bn on cybersecurity between 2016 and 2021. This is for all departments, including the MoD, the surveillance agency GCHQ and GCHQ's front window, the National Cyber Security Centre.
But the MoD is way behind in spending on cybersecurity, its involvement minuscule compared with GCHQ and the NCSC. The MoD proudly announced in 2016 it was building a new cyber-defence operations centre at its Corsham base in Wiltshire but the amount, £40m, is tiny compared with overall departmental spending.
The army has only itself to blame. When Labour came to power in 1997 and the coalition formed in 2010, there was a chance to listen to collective defence wisdom and accept that Britain discontinue its aircraft carriers and Trident nuclear deterrent. They would eat money and serve no reasonable defence purpose, least of all now in the age of unmanned power projection. The navy and the RAF lobbied furiously, and a sceptical army said nothing. Downing Street capitulated to a massive distortion in equipment defence spending, largely at the army’s expense.
Last year, Britain’s second aircraft carrier was launched, bringing their cost close to £7bn, wildly over budget. Trident was extended. A sign of Trident’s lunacy is that the Treasury proposes to remove it from the defence budget altogether. It will go with HS2, overseas aid and Olympics legacy under the heading “vanity project”.
Britain’s three services should long ago have merged into one, so that defence could be viewed in the round, not as a derivative of mutual lobbying. Defence should be seen from threat upwards, not history downwards. Such is the anarchy that British taxes are now financing the country’s “defence” in no fewer than 80 overseas outposts around the world, chiefly as mercenaries to American interventionism.
The row over defence spending has nothing to do with defence, but with an arbitrary target, unrelated to threat, for it to consume 2% of the nation’s wealth. Labour’s spokesman, Nia Griffiths, who should be challenging this, merely attacks the government for damaging “Britain’s international credibility”. What is she talking about? Germany has no need of drone squadrons and nuclear missiles for its credibility.
A sure sign of the decay of the defence debate is the abstract language in which it is conducted. Defence is now a mish-mash of rightwing virtue-signalling, international credibility, influence, greatness, friendship and showing the flag. Tell that to the NHS.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
