Rishi Sunak’s government is using support for Ukraine to cover up its failings to keep Britain’s own defensive capabilities afloat, MPs have warned.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps was this week hounded by the Defence Select Committee, a Conservative member of which accused him of playing “smoke and mirrors.”
Tory MP Mark Francois said Shapps was “cheating” by counting military aid donated to Ukraine in its war against Russia as funding for defence at home. Labour’s Kevan Jones added that the secretary “couldn’t lie straight in bed.”
Defence papers were earlier this month disappointed to see government spending in the sector cut by £2.5 billion (€2.92bn) in Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s budget, but noted that the Ministry of Defence “attempted to mitigate concerns by … [pointing to] ongoing support to Ukraine.”
Francois told Shapps:
The amount we are giving to Ukraine is £2.5 billion, almost exactly the same as the cut in next year’s core defence budget. That £2.5bn for Ukraine is not part of the UK defence budget, you cannot spend the same pound twice.
You are trying to play smoke and mirrors with the Ukrainian money to pretend that your budget hasn’t been cut when it has. In plain pub English, you’re cheating.
When Shapps insisted that the issue had been misunderstood and that the figures cited were “misleading,” Francois responded that the secretary was “trying to blow smoke in everybody’s eyes.”
It’s not exactly as if the British Army is doing well enough with its current levels of funding. In fact, things are so bad that Lieutenant General Sir Rob Magowan, the deputy chief of the defence staff, was this week forced to warn that the military doesn’t even have enough money to buy the ammunition it needs to meet current threats.
Almost three years have passed since an online war simulation saw the British Army run out of ammunition after a mere eight days. Yet little appears to have changed, with Magowan declaring:
The amount of money we are spending on munitions, at the moment, does not meet, in all areas, the threats that we face.
