Putin must be laughing all the way to his arsenal over the Tories’ baffling and disgraceful failure to boost defence spending in the Budget

More spending on defence, opined Chancellor Jeremy Hunt last week, is best secured by more economic growth. 

Thus spoke the quintessential number-crunching Tory technocrat. He couldn’t be more wrong.

When the world is already a very dangerous place and about to get even more dangerous, it is the duty of government to bolster our national security regardless of how poorly the economy is growing. 

You find the money wherever you can by borrowing more, raising taxes, moving money from non-defence spending to our military.

Defence of the realm, after all, is the first duty of government, never more so than when there are multiple threats on all fronts.

You’d think a Tory government would realise that. But not this one.

Hunt claimed that UK defence spending, currently just over two per cent of GDP (the Nato minimum), would rise to 2.5 per cent when ‘economic conditions’ allowed. 

He put no timeline on this aspiration, gave no definition of what these ‘economic conditions’ would look like. 

Given that the hallmark of his period as Chancellor has been economic stagnation, the honest answer might be ‘never’. 

We don’t really know, however, because in a long Budget speech last Wednesday Hunt dismissed defence in barely a sentence.

It was an unforgivable, inglorious omission. Ukraine struggles to roll back Russia’s unprovoked invasion. We know that if President Putin succeeds in his ambition to annex the country (or most of it) much of Eastern Europe (Nato members all) will be in jeopardy.

As the Middle East goes up in flames our Navy is already involved in a hot war with Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in the Red Sea. 

President Xi’s threats to Taiwan grow ever more bellicose. Our allies, especially America, fret (rightly) that our forces are simply not up to the military challenges we face. 

Yet Hunt had next to nothing to say about defence, never mind stumping up an extra penny for it.

It’s not that there is no money, just that he doesn’t see it as a priority. Public spending this financial year (2023-’24) will be almost £1.2trillion. 

Defence accounts for just over £50billion of that, a mere four per cent and a bit. We have one of the biggest GDPs in the world but we’re only prepared to devote two per cent of it to defence.

Nobody can be in any doubt that in parlous times our military is being short-changed.

But no Chancellor has the power to change this unilaterally. The Prime Minister would have to be onside, too. 

And in Rishi Sunak, another Tory technocrat, we have a Prime Minister who is complicit with his Chancellor in starving defence of the necessary funding. Neither seems to care much.

The Budget left no doubt about that. They found £10billion to cut National Insurance. But nothing extra for defence. 

They froze fuel duty again at a cost of £5billion rather than raise more revenue for defence. Hunt did increase a variety of taxes but none of the extra dosh went on defence.

He wittered on about Britain becoming the next Silicon Valley (it isn’t) and how the NHS is what makes us most proud to be British (again, for many, it really isn’t). 

But he had not a word to say about how the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) were working hand-in-glove to develop a new, well-funded defence strategy to keep our nation safe.

Nothing could be more important. Our military has been hollowed out so much in recent years as to make us ineffective on so many fronts. 

In only the past eight years our combat power has been denuded. We have fewer tanks, troops, sailors, missile launchers, artillery, helicopters, fighter jets and ships – just about everything you need to defend the country and wage war against its enemies – than we had even in 2016, when our defence capabilities were already creaking at the seams.

Eight years ago the British Army had over 4,000 bits of military equipment essential for deployment in a war zone. Today the total is just over 3,000. 

In 2016 we had almost 1,120 armoured fighting vehicles; now it’s under 900. We had 200 Scimitar light tanks; now we have none. We had 770 ageing Warrior vehicles; now it’s 625 – and its Ajax replacement is mired in procurement problems. We had 227 Challenger tanks; now it’s 213, with barely 100 battle-ready – and the Challenger 3 is being rolled out slowly and in small numbers. We had 724 fixed-wing aircraft; now 564, of which only 300 are in service. 

The deterioration in our military capabilities has been going on for some time. But in recent years, under the Tories, it has accelerated.

Of course the MoD’s cack-handed approach to procurement has made matters worse and I’ve written about that at length on these pages. But what is required now are not fancy new defence systems, simply more of what we have already.

We need more ammunition, more manpower, more artillery, more fighting vehicles, more fighter jets, more ships, more drones, more heavy-lift capabilities, more missiles. 

Where current suppliers are unable to provide this extra equipment we should not hesitate to buy off the shelf from abroad, which is cheaper and quicker anyway.

The bane of British military procurement has been the obsession with our top brass and the MoD for expensive, bespoke, gold-plated equipment which, in the end, we can only afford to buy in small numbers.

A lot of what we have is good. But it lacks resilience and scale. In any major conflict we’d quickly run out of manpower and fighting machines. 

The Poles are building the strongest land forces in Europe in a different, better way – by buying hundreds of tanks and fighter jets off the shelf from South Korea.

They will end up with an army and airforce far bigger and better equipped than ours.

South Korea faces an existential threat from the Stalinist dictator to its north. Poland will face a similar threat to its east should Putin triumph in Ukraine. 

If South Korean military hardware, which benefits from huge American input, is good enough for South Korea and Poland then it should be good enough for us. 

There are also plenty of other sources of quality military equipment around the world for a speedy rearmament.

Though there was nothing for defence in last week’s Budget, it should still serve as a wake-up call for the nation. 

We have become a country in which couples with a combined income of £120,000 a year will still get child benefit from the state — but we cannot finance our military to the level required to ensure our safety. 

We devise yet more tax incentives to make more films in the UK, including films about war. But we cannot put up more to equip us for a real war. Putin must be laughing all the way to his arsenal.

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps says we need to prepare for possible war in the near future, that we are in a pre-war, not a post-war, phase. Is that just his view or is it the Government’s? 

If it’s the collective view of the Sunak administration – and it should be given the escalating dangers all around us – then it is all the more baffling and disgraceful that the Budget was empty-handed when it came to defence.

The lesson of the 1930s is clear: a failure to rearm in the face of autocratic aggression only emboldens dictators to be even more aggressive – and the cost of seeing them off becomes all the greater in terms of blood and treasure. 

The reputation of the generation between the two world wars that failed to see that never recovered and they remain reviled in history books to this day.

Now the autocrats are on the march again and it falls to a new generation to confront them. So far it is failing in much the same way as that inter-war generation failed us. 

If today’s political elite does not quickly change tack and recognise that we need to face down the evil that is gathering strength across the globe with a well-armed and reinvigorated military of scale, then it too will never be forgiven.