Incoming victims’ commissioner warns government’s various strategies lack cohesion
Kemi Badenoch has vowed to scrap green spending to pay for a multibillion-pound fund to rearm the UK, PA Media report. PA says:
Accusing Labour of failing to invest in the UK’s armed forces, the Conservative leader has proposed reallocating £17bn to “accelerate” Britain’s “war readiness”.
She said: “We must ensure our armed forces are equipped and ready to defend our country, because defence of the realm must be the first priority of any government.”
-£6bn (£2bn per annum over the course of this parliament) would be reallocated from the Research and Development (R&D) budget in the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology to the MOD. It is well known that defence technology and innovation can have spillover effects into other sectors, like communications and transport, causing a multiplier effect.
-£11bn ringfenced from the national wealth fund (NWF) – which will become the national defence and resilience bank (NDRB). This funding is currently allocated to many of Ed Miliband’s costly eco-projects. We would leave the remainder of financing in the fund for national resilience like water and transport.
The Tories are gaslighting the British public on defence.
These are yet more fantasy figures from a Conservative party that cut defence by £12bn in their first five years in power. Look at their record: their time in office starved our forces of funding, drove down morale and left Britain less safe. They did it before, and they’d do it again.
The drastic restriction of the right to trial by jury is not a silver bullet. To limit a fundamental right for what will make a marginal difference to the backlog, if any, is madness and will cause more problems than it solves.