Nick Clegg has said that the Conservative party has to “come clean” on defence spending, arguing that they cannot shrink the state and also “somehow pretend that they can fund everything in sight”.
Speaking on Monday, the deputy prime minister said: “You cannot provide the British people with adequately resourced police forces, or an adequately resourced military forces if you take this ideological approach to reducing the amount of money that goes into public spending as a proportion of GDP for no economic reason at all.”
“At some point, the Conservative party has got to come clean. They cannot have their cake and eat it. They cannot embark on this rightwing lurch towards an ever-shrinking state and also somehow pretend that they can fund everything in sight. You can’t. Something has to give.”
The comments come as pressure builds on the Conservative party to commit to the Nato target of spending 2% of GDP on defence beyond 2016.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, the Tory MP for Basildon and Billericay, John Baron, said that the Nato commitment should be seen as a bare minimum. Last week, the head of the US army, Gen Raymond Odierno, expressed serious reservations about the impact of cuts on the capacity of British forces.
MPs are due to hold a backbench debate on defence spending on Thursday.
David Cameron said on Monday hat the £160bn budget for defence equipment over the next 10 years would grow in real terms under a Conservative government and that he did not want to see any further reductions in the regular armed forces. The prime minister added: “I would say that you can’t have strong defence without a strong economy and we wouldn’t be able to make those pledges without the strong economy we now have.”
Clegg stopped short of committing his own party to the defence spending target.
“We spend just over 2% of GDP on defence presently,” he said. “What we spend in the future will obviously be subject to a strategic defence review and future spending rounds.”
The deputy prime minister was speaking at a press conference alongside the business secretary, Vince Cable, where they set out Liberal Democrat plans to make the UK economy the “powerhouse of Europe”, overtaking France and Germany to become the biggest economy on the continent in a generation.
Clegg said that the UK could have ended up in a similar situation to Greece if it had not been for the Liberal Democrats providing a stabilising influence in the coalition government.
“When the Liberal Democrats took the decision to step up to the plate and enter government in May 2010, Britain’s economy was on the brink,” he said.
“It may not feel like it now but we could have been Greece. In 2010, their deficit was 11% of GDP, ours was 10%. Britain desperately needed stability and the Liberal Democrats provided that by forming the only government capable of delivering it: a strong, stable coalition government.”
