Simon Jenkins - Britain already throws money at defence. Ignore this Russian red herring

The fearmongering over cyber-warfare with Russia isn’t about actual threat, it’s about vanity, history and MoD greed

Simon Jenkins is a moderate conservative who is spot on again. Why can't some Guardian journalists on the left, like George Monbiot, be writing this stuff?

The Russians are coming. The terrorists are at the door. Feel afraid, feel very afraid. Give us the money.

Every year at budget time, the defence lobby waves shrouds and howls blue murder. With yet another defence review in the offing, the army fears it will lose thousands of soldiers, while the navy and the Royal Air Force fear the (long overdue) merger of the paratroop and marine brigades and the loss of more frigates.

Britain’s defence budget is one of the largest in proportion to population in the world, the largest in the EU and the second largest in Nato. This is unrelated to threat and entirely related to history. That is why each year no one asks what the nation needs, only whether it can “do with” less than the year before..

The army has only itself to blame. When Labour came to power in 1997 and the coalition formed in 2010, there was a chance to listen to collective defence wisdom and accept that Britain discontinue its aircraft carriers and Trident nuclear deterrent. They would eat money and serve no reasonable defence purpose, least of all now in the age of unmanned power projection. The navy and the RAF lobbied furiously, and a sceptical army said nothing. Downing Street capitulated to a massive distortion in equipment defence spending, largely at the army’s expense.

Last year, Britain’s second aircraft carrier was launched, bringing their cost close to £7bn, wildly over budget. Trident was extended. A sign of Trident’s lunacy is that the Treasury proposes to remove it from the defence budget altogether. It will go with HS2, overseas aid and Olympics legacy under the heading “vanity project”.

Britain’s three services should long ago have merged into one, so that defence could be viewed in the round, not as a derivative of mutual lobbying. Defence should be seen from threat upwards, not history downwards. Such is the anarchy that British taxes are now financing the country’s “defence” in no fewer than 80 overseas outposts around the world, chiefly as mercenaries to American interventionism.

The row over defence spending has nothing to do with defence, but with an arbitrary target, unrelated to threat, for it to consume 2% of the nation’s wealth. Labour’s spokesman, Nia Griffiths, who should be challenging this, merely attacks the government for damaging “Britain’s international credibility”. What is she talking about? Germany has no need of drone squadrons and nuclear missiles for its credibility.

A sure sign of the decay of the defence debate is the abstract language in which it is conducted. Defence is now a mish-mash of rightwing virtue-signalling, international credibility, influence, greatness, friendship and showing the flag. Tell that to the NHS.