How much do we spend on the military?

As shocks go, Politician Uses the Correct Statistic is not particularly electric stuff. But I was struck nonetheless by Cameron’s claim in his speech earlier that, “we still have the fourth largest military budget in the world.” You see, Gordon Brown used to exaggerate this figure by various sneaky methods – and so, by his account, we’d be second in the military spending league table, rather than around fifth. Whereas Cameron had it spot on. Here’s what the latest top ten looks like, going off the best measurement that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute knows (see their explanation here):

On the face of it, this would appear to be a strong point against the claim that we underspend on defence. But it doesn’t close the case. If you measure military spending as a percentage of GDP, then our total – of around 2.5 per cent – puts us about thirty places outside the top ten.