How Not to Cut Spending: More Defense Cuts in Britain Loom

Ted Bromund / June 30, 2009

Not so quietly, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in Britain: defense spending must be cut. Last month, the Economist, in writing about “the end of the New Labour orthodoxy on public spending” – the orthodoxy being that the public sector “should consume an ever-increasing share of national wealth” – stated in passing that only the Liberal Democrats had grasped the need to axe major programs, like Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.

This month, David Halpern, former Chief Analyst in Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, writes in Prospect magazine that, instead of spending less on “obesity, climate change or social exclusion,” British ministers should “use tough decisions as a way of expressing their values—by switching cash out of fighter planes into stimulating our fledgling electric car industry, for example.” (more…)