One of the really striking claims that Ed Balls made in his speech today was that the Tories would end up cutting more from the defence budget than Labour. This is not the sort of thing that you’d expect to hear: Labour saying it would end up spending more on defence than the traditional party of the armed forces. The Shadow Chancellor said:
‘First of all, our cuts, in any part of public spending, are not going to go nowhere near the huge scale of defence cuts you are going to see under the Conservatives on the basis of these plans.’
Balls also said that it was ‘absolutely impossible on the Conservative trajectory’ to meet the target for defence spending to remain at 2 per cent of GDP. When David Cameron was asked about the issue today, he started talking about ‘what we have said very clearly’, which is always the way a politician admits that things are mired (perhaps conveniently) in confusion:
‘What we have said very clearly is that the £160 billion capital budget… the equipment budget, over the next 10 years, that will grow in real terms under a Conservative government.
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