Gooner9145.
5.7K posts

Gooner9145.
@supergooner45
Love Arsenal, Lincoln City, Brexit, and Isreal, hate everything woke, lefties,the EU, and want out of the ECHR have always voted Tory but now voting Reform
England, United Kingdom Katılım Temmuz 2011
5.2K Takip Edilen6.1K Takipçiler
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi

My monologue from today’s The Times at One with Andrew Neil @TimesRadio
FAILURE TO INCREASE DEFENCE SPENDING A NATIONAL SCANDAL.
The failure of the Starmer government to increase defence spending by anything like enough is becoming a national scandal.
The need has never been greater in peacetime. Wars are raging in Ukraine and the Gulf. A revanchist Russia bears down on Eastern Europe. The Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian hands — and closed.
President Trump has gone from rightly demanding NATO’s European members do more for their own defence to wrongly threatening to pull America out of NATO altogether.
Yet the Starmer government sits on its hands doing next to nothing.
It sensibly commissioned a Strategic Defence Review when it came to power in the summer of 2024. That review reported in June 2025.
The government accepted all 62 of its proposals to reconfigure our military and rearm the country. It promised a Defence Investment Plan by the autumn to show how we’d pay for it.
Almost a year later there’s still no sign of it. Neither the PM nor the Defence Secretary can tell us when we will see it.
Meanwhile defence spending stutters, wholly inadequate to the tasks at hand. Trump’s War in the Gulf has exposed just how hollowed out our armed forces have become
— a diminished Navy, most of which cannot be deployed at sea
— an airforce short of fighter jets
— a minuscule army incapable of mounting a major armoured fighting force
— a country without its own ballistic missile defence.
Yet none of that can be put right on current or planned levels of defence spending.
Of course Labour’s inheritance was a terrible one. Fourteen years of Tory government were marked by a clear deterioration in our military prowess.
In the Cameron/Osborne years between 2010 and 2016, defence spending was cut in real terms by 22%. A fatal fall. Subsequent upticks did little to fill the hole that cut left.
But blaming the Tories only gets you so far. Rather than making up for lost ground the Starmer is largely standing still.
It inherited defence spending in its first year — 2024/25 — of £60 billion. It increased that by a mere £2 billion for 2025/26 — a pathetic amount in a dangerous world. And that’s in cash terms, without taking inflation into account.
It’s added only £3.5 billion — again in cash terms — for the upcoming financial year 2026/27. It barely takes the defence budget to 2.5% of GDP.
Yes, there are bigger rises in the years after that. But it’s still too little, too late — and barely moves defence above 2.5% of GDP.
Starmer has vaguely committed to 3% in the next Parliament — ie the early 2030s — and to 3.5% by 2035, which would be the next parliament after that. But these are only ambitions. There is no roadmap, no blueprint, no budget plan to get there.
Defence spending needs to be ramped up far more quickly than that. Instead, sleight of hand is exaggerating what small increases there are.
Ministers try to slip in the intelligence services when counting defence. The cost of helping Ukraine. Unfunded pay rises for the military.
It all means that in real terms even the small uptick in defence spending is not as big as it seems.
There was a time when, as a share of GDP, Britain spent more on defence than any other NATO member bar America. It is a measure of our military decline that we’re now 12th — and still slipping.
The money is there if only there was the willpower to move it to defence — from the massive profligate expense of net zero, from the ballooning welfare budget, from a new time-limited tax, perhaps on luxuries, if that’s what it takes.
Other countries get the need to rearm — Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, Canada, even the peace-loving Scandinavians. But not Keir Starmer’s Britain.
It is his single biggest dereliction of duty. He needs to put it right. Before it’s too late. Or it will be forever the blackest of marks on his tenure in power.
English
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi

So the new eejit leader of The Green Party,Zac Polanski reckons it’s OK to shoplift if you’re poor. So a party leader is openly encouraging people to commit a crime that cost retailers £2.2BILLION last year? express.co.uk/news/uk/210499…
English
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi

🚨 Holding the BBC to account:
Green Party activists and candidates made horrific comments, calling Jewish people “abominations”.
God forbid had this been Reform activists it would have led the news cycle behind only the war in Iran.
Yet because it’s the Greens? The BBC did not even cover it.
English
Gooner9145. retweetledi
Gooner9145. retweetledi

@Jenny_1884 @Lizziek28184692 People who vote for him must have a serious mental condition, he is beyond weird
English
Gooner9145. retweetledi

RT @afneil: The current state of the Royal Navy:
2 aircraft carriers — neither operational.
6 Type 45 destroyers (our most powerful battle…
English
Gooner9145. retweetledi















