The UK budget, announced on 3 March, has been criticised for hiding further austerity – but not for the military.
Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies told the BBC that, with the cuts to planned spending announced last autumn, the government will be cutting spending and raising taxes ‘to the tune of nearly £50bn’ relative to their pre-pandemic plans of March 2020.
Military spending was given a huge ring-fenced four-year programme of increases last November. This represents ‘a real-term increase of between 10 percent and 15 percent in the defence budget: equivalent to some £4 billion more annually than had been promised,’ according to the semi-official thinktank, RUSI.