The Telegraph, 4 February, Roger Bootle
Rishi Sunak has an “aspiration” to increase defence spending from 2pc of GDP to 2.5pc. But I doubt whether President Putin places much store by aspirations.
The next government, whether Conservative or Labour, will have to conduct a defence review pretty soon and, in contrast to recent efforts, this is going to have to involve major increases in our defence spending.
History helps to put matters in perspective. Spending 2pc to 2.5pc of GDP on defence is not unprecedented. Indeed, that was the level of our defence spending throughout the later part of the 19th century. Mind you, in those days we were the global hegemon, there was less expensive, high-tech equipment to spend money on and, of course, there was no RAF.
Defence spending rose in the run-up to the First World War and exceeded 50pc of GDP in 1916 and 1917. After the war, it fell back to 2.5pc of GDP but in 1936 defence spending rose to 3.5pc, followed by 4.6pc, 6.5pc and 9.2pc in 1939, again rising to over 50pc during the Second World War, before falling back sharply afterwards.
Strikingly, our defence spending was running at 4pc of GDP or over throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, falling to 3.8pc only in 1987. It was 4.5pc of GDP in 1982, the year of the Falklands War. And, despite cashing in the so-called peace dividend, we were still spending 3pc of GDP on defence in the early 1990s.
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