Get this: the Sun is calling for higher public spending. It’s true. Rupert Murdoch’s right wing mouthpiece that is currently campaigning to make much of its readership worse off by supporting the Tory cuts to tax credits is calling for more money to be spent in a government department. Today it leads with a story of how overseas aid is being “blown on lonely fish in Africa” whilst at the same time “our military is being cut to the bone”.
“Cut to the bone”? This must come as a big surprise to the civil servants who work for the MOD, especially here in Bristol where 7000 of them are employed in South Gloucestershire. What the Sun has failed to mention is that not only is there a hugely bloated and still growing bureaucracy in the MOD, it’s staff are some of the most highly paid and most regularly promoted workers in the entire public sector, earning vastly more than their counterparts in other departments.
I am not critical of the generous salaries paid to MOD civil servants. Indeed, I wish that workers in other sectors enjoyed similar salaries, promotions and conditions. And unlike in other departments, the MOD continues to enjoy real increases in spending. PM David Cameron likes to boast that his government was able to get MOD spending under control but the reality is that the gravy train is a long way from hitting the buffers just yet.
I really wish we would have an open debate on defence spending and why we need it. We, the poor taxpayers, only get to see headlines like in the Sun today, no discussion. I do not believe a word I read in Murdoch’s newspapers so I treat today’s “cut to the bone” non story with the contempt it probably deserves. We are merely told that we need X number of warships, X number of planes and X number of tanks, but the explanations as to why are never there. We are just there to pay the bill.
I confess to being a late convert to the nuclear deterrent, as the world teeters into further conflict, quite possibly with countries which themselves have nuclear weapons. Pakistan and Iran, hardly the models of peace and democracy, appear to have the capability to blow us all to smithereens so now is not the time to disarm. But our conventional forces? I just don’t know. They have carried out heroic missions in disastrous and ultimately failed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I would argue in both cases we should never have been involved in either, so who and what is our defence system aimed at? Russia? China? Pakistan?
The government is about to condemn many more people to poverty whilst at the same time pouring much of these savings into weaponry. It may be that we need to do this in order to protect ourselves but I am not convinced. And the truth is that the layman and woman doesn’t know.
One thing is for sure: the MOD is not being cut to the bone. In recent years, they have re-employed those to whom they dished out generous redundancy deals on even higher salaries and they have taken civil servants in huge numbers from other government departments that really are being cut to the bone. I’d love for someone to get the statistics on how many staff from the DWP have moved to the MOD in the last few years and gained far higher financial and career rewards.
If the Sun wants public spending to be increased, either hell will have frozen over or they have an entirely different agenda, like scrapping overseas aid altogether. The Sun is definitely an enemy of the people.
