Are we wasting money on defence?

Backing the Americans in Iraq has not served the national interest, says Paul Robinson; we’d be more secure if we adopted a less interventionist foreign policy and reduced our military capacity

Soldiers are not social workers. They fight and they kill — that is what they are trained to do. They are not trained to ‘do good’. Yet turn to the Ministry of Defence website and you will see that the very first words on the ‘Army Jobs: Army Life’ recruiting page are, ‘The British Army is a force for good.’ The site then goes on to stress the army’s activities ‘around the world’. Defending the UK barely gets a mention. Similarly, the Labour party’s defence website, under the heading ‘Our Approach’, states immediately that ‘Labour believes that Britain should act as a force for good in the world.’ (One wonders whether they think that Conservatives believe that Britain should act as a force for evil.