Shades of the 1930s

Jeff Randall in The Telegraph discusses New Labour's (and the Tories when it comes to it) complete unwillingness to treat the defence of the realm as anything other than the bastard red-haired child of the family. How bad is it? The numbers don't get put forward very often, and for good, reason, but Defence's share of the British budget is 5.6 percent. That puts it on a par with "personal social services".

Britain's armed forces aren't dwindling because Britain is in decline. It's because they're being needlessly pennypinched to death by a political class who sees no votes in them. Szondy's rule of thumb for a healthy democracy is that Defence takes up 51 percent of the central government (as opposed to local) budget. If it's any less, then you're either not buying enough bullets or you're buying too much butter. In Britain's case, we aren't buying any bullets and we've got so much damn butter that we'll all die of heart attacks before we become too weak to defend ourselves.