A truely sad day for the RN.  All we can hope for is an about face if the Conservatives win the next general election.

Not a chance I'm afraid.

 

In order to increase public spending the Tories would either have to:

 

1 - Raise taxes.

2 - Raise borrowing.

3 - Reduce spending elsewhere.

4 - Find some enormous efficiency savings.

 

The Tories are in the position that Labour was in 1996/7; the government is deeply unpopular and all the opposition has to do is sit tight, appear nice and promise not to do anything nasty to the electorate. Broadly speaking this, together with the parlous state of the public finances, effectively rules out options 1,2 and 3. Every government would like to do 4, but none have managed it on the scale required.

 

 

Essex

 

Essexboy is completely correct. In no way, shape or form have the Tories even mentioned the merest hint of increasing the defence budget. I suspect they won't.

 

The T45's are great ships but hopelessly overpriced at £1 billion a pop. As I mentioned on the carrier thread, the Dutch De Zeven Provincien Destroyer's are only half the price (if that much). They might not be such good AA warships but they are perfectly adequate for what we need.

I thought it was $ 1 billion, not £1 billion. I thought it was somewhere in the region of 600-800 million pounds.

 

Granted each single t-45 has more equivalent firepower than the entire t-42 fleet, and granted the two F-35 equipped carriers will give us so much more flexibility than the current navy. I'd prefer more ships - who would'nt. The navy took 30 surface escorts down to the falklands, let's not forget however, that some of those ships were hideously out of date and some, like the HMS Plymouth were basically useless due to their antiquity.

 

I'm just happy that the carriers will be built, we will finally have a balanced navy for the first time in decades. Even if the T-45 production line gets capped at six, the minister also stated that replacements for the T22/23 frigates will be accelerated, if the defence budget gets less squeased, i.e. a rundown in the Iraq commitment, there is the possibility that the FCS program might be expanded to cater for a couple more AA influenced hulls.

 

Good old fashioned british muddling.

Rumours are that the RN agreed to the cut of two T45's in return for reassurances about the capabilities and numbers for the FSC - i.e. the high-grade 'C1' version will provide a significant AAW supplement to the T45s..

 

That said, who knows what budgetary pressures the MOD will be facing come decision time on numbers and capability for those ships.

AP, you left off the approx £50Bn that the goverment has spent out on 900 odd Quangos.

 

Neither party will make defence a priority as long as their are no votes in it. Neither party contains politicians who are particularly in it for the common good, neither contains politicians who are selfless. Politics is a career for them, and they treat is as such. They make decisions on spending priorities based on whether its good for their career, not on some noble position on the long term benefit of the UK. You two talk as if you think they're making mighty decisions, weighing up difficult decisions, calculating long term benefit. This isn't the case, you're both naive.

Decisions under this Govt and to a lesser extent the previous one are made according to how they will play in the press.  That's it, their is no more consideration.

I actually disagree with this. I know that saying that "politicians are only interested in votes" sounds good (particularly if you don't agree with their priorities) but the fact is that the armed forces just ain't that important. It's the role of government to decide what is and isn't important based on true and fair judgements and I think that's what they try to do. Call me naive, but I don't notice any other political parties wanting to change defence spending so that shows that they all quietly agree with each other on this issue.

 

I know lot's of people are going to say that I'm wrong and we need loads of ships to protect trade, and a large army for Afghanistan etc but there are no serious threats to us out there and won't be for a good many years. I've heard all those arguments before but they're irrelevent. I state again that our country wouldn't be in the least bit threatened if:

- The fleet was cut back to 8 frigates and some submarines

- The army was reduced to 4 or 5 brigades

- The RAF transport fleet disappeared and only 10 combat sqns were kept. 

 

The only threats that do exist (disaffected kids in Bradford) can't be dealt with by the armed forces anyway. You may have noticed that the government is taking very decisive (and unpopular) measures to deal with this including doubling the secret service and secret intelligence service's budgets. Where there is a genuine threat they will take action.

That should of be course be Freems delayed to 2011.

 

I think the C1's are a pipe-dream anyway. All of the armed forces need to be far more realistic about what they can do and what is affordable.

That should of be course be Freems delayed to 2011.

 

I think the C1's are a pipe-dream anyway. All of the armed forces need to be far more realistic about what they can do and what is affordable.

No. You're both utterly and totally wrong. Defence spending at 2.2%ish is the lowest its possibly ever been as a proportion of the economy. The idea that a few billion can't be found for two more destroyers is pathetic. God knows who tells you what your opinions should be.

Does anybody tell you what your views should be? No? Then why assume that someone tells me what I believe? My opinions may be wrong but they're mine. Perhaps I should have stated the bleeding obvious that a country with a GDP of about £1.35trillion and public spending of £600bn can easily afford a defence budget of more than £35bn.

Your point that there are no votes in increasing defence expenditure is absolutely correct. If the opposite were the case then the Tories could win votes by promising to put up taxes, increase borrowing or cut welfare payments to fund increased defence expenditure.  However, neither party is going to do this as there are a lot more votes in appearing to be competent in managing the country's finances. The Tories are going to hammer Labour at the next election by  attacking their economic record and at the same time saying that they will look after the NHS etc. They will not give Labour any chance to accuse them of making imprudent, uncosted spending pledges Nor will they want to give Labour any chance of branding them the "nasty" party by making cuts to the NHS or schools system.

 

*ID cards are budgeted to cost £18bn .
This is one area where I think you've got a point. The Tories are opposed to this policy and have promised to scrap the scheme. They haven't said what they'd do with the savings, due to their policy of not making decisions until they see how much of a mess things are when they take over.

*The NHS IT diasaster was budgeted at £12bn.
Has this already been spent? Could it be scrapped now or in 2010/11? What would be the likely political fall-out of cancelling a major NHS project?
*The Olympics is budgeted at £3.3bn, expect that to double easily.
Quite possibly so, but there's nothing either party can do about it now. That money's gone.
*We spend £29bn a year paying the national debt, that's up from £22bn in 2001. Why?
Because government borrowing has increased?
*DBERR costs £6bn and adds nothing. Certainly no business person would prefer having DBERR to say a £3bn corporation tax cut and a £3bn rise in spending on manufacturing through adding that half to the yearly Defence procurement budget.
How may people would this mean sacking? How much would it cost in redundancy and unemployment payments, and how many civil service votes would it lose the governement? I've had nothing to do with the Dti or whatever it is now but I find it hard to believe that it serves no useful purpose.

*International development costs us £4.6bn, that is a purely discretionary amount. What is the moral level of spending for a rich country like the UK to spend on the international poor? Why not £20bn or £0.5bn? In fact last year we gave £1bn to a region of India, a country that is richer than us on a PPP basis.
There is no way that either party would scrap foreign aid: the Labour party believes it's a moral obligation to help the third world and the Tories won't expose themselves to the "nasty" tag by cutting the programmes.

As for the 'parlous' state of the finances ask yourself how they manage to be 'parlous' despite Govt. spending being at £600bn the greatest nominal amount ever.
The finances are in a parlous state because the government based its spending plans on over optimistic assessments of economic growth and tax receipts.
I think I may have made similar points as these more than once before.............

Neither party will make defence a priority as long as their are no votes in it. Neither party contains politicians who are particularly in it for the common good, neither contains politicians who are selfless. Politics is a career for them, and they treat is as such. They make decisions on spending priorities based on whether its good for their career, not on some noble position on the long term benefit of the UK. You two talk as if you think they're making mighty decisions, weighing up difficult decisions, calculating long term benefit. This isn't the case, you're both naive.
I didn't say anything of the sort. I said that that the Tories were concentrating on winning the election and (after eleven years in opposition) were not going to do anything that would jeapodise what look likes to be an easy win. Decisions under this Govt and to a lesser extent the previous one are made according to how they will play in the press.  That's it, their is no more consideration. Agreed.