To think we need to prioritise defence/Ukraine spending?

[Wildflowers99]

I’ll admit I had no idea how depleted our military has become until a few weeks ago. I was absolutely staggered to read we now spend more on PIP and DLA than our entire military.

I feel like slowly all of our public spending has been funnelled into health, benefits and social care, leaving everything else in a very poor state. Any time anyone has suggested spending money on anything apart from ‘freezing pensioners, the homeless or disabled’ they get shouted down (I am disabled btw, so I do understand the need).

AIBU to think we need to urgently address our spending priorities and as a nation wake up to the fact we’ve been overspending on the above for too long?

They’re (obviously) agreeing that we should prioritise spending on defence and Ukraine.

Nobody has yet suggested how we can do that, they’ve just attacked what I suggested.

Well, it is being prioritised and it will need to be prioritised at the expense of something, and that is the harder part of the conversation.

Cuts to departmental spending and to benefits were already coming down the pipeline and ready to be delivered in the spring statement before Trump pulled up the funding and weapon's drawbridge to the Ukraine.

So, yes, it's going to be a matter of what else and I would like to hear more about it - surely it all can't be funded from the interest payments of frozen Russian assets?

I'm sure we could save a bit by assessing people properly and not forcing so many to go tribunal which they end up winning. We could save some money by not reassessing those of us with incurable disabilities

Whatever you think of the OP (and I have no view, I'm rarely on benefit-related threads so havent the faintest what she's said), the first duty of the state is to protect its people (this is the philosophical underpinning justifying the establishment of states, more or less).

Part of that protection involves being able to stymy foreign powers that have malign intentions towards us when they attack allied or even neutral nations. We know Russia has malign intentions: cyber attacks and damage to power infrastructure in Europe, beyond Ukraine, have shown this.

Moreover, we should have learned from our experiences with Herr Adolf, c1938, that appeasing dictators and autocrats doesn't end well.

For these reasons, we need to be able to assist Ukraine, and to protect ourselves. The world is still shifting from the communist block vs everyone else paradigm that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall into a new balance. Currently esp with Trump behaving like a lunatic, the situation is deeply unstable.

Hence, the responsible and sensible thing for the government to do is increase spending on defence and intelligence. Given the appalling state of the country's finances (we've been living on tick and mortgaging the future) this will involve some hard choices.

Brace yourselves.

Edited for SPAG.

Many people agree with you because whenever there is a thread about disability benefits it,s very obvious most people don't have a clue how it works and think it's easy to just say you have a disability and hey presto you get PIP.

You didn’t ask them to.

do you know what’s in the entire government budget by department?

do you know what the spend by dept was 24/25?

do you know what future investment/ efficiency plans are committed to?

nope and neither does anyone here. So anyone telling you how the military should be funded is obviously full of crap.

Nobody is saying that but we now have 3.5 million claimants (that’s not taking into account children on DLA or pensioners who receive something different).

It doesn’t have to be benefits but what else can we cut if not the biggest and fastest rising expenditure? I genuinely want to know. It’s not ideological if the spending was on for example education I would be saying to cut that instead.

Russian assets should obviously be used first but they total 300 billion in the whole EU, we need to raise 800 billion. It won’t be enough.

Yes, they want an end to all non means tested benefits, and want to see DLA/PIP halved. Um, DLA/PIP are not means tested, so what is it to be? Shows a lack of understanding, for sure.

I don't think going after the most vulnerable in society is the way forward.

I believe Starmer has said that he will fund the spending to Ukraine by reductions in foreign aid?

I don’t think wealthy people claiming PIP are vulnerable. I don’t think it is at all unreasonable to say a wealthy person should not be claiming benefits from an increasingly skint country under huge pressure.

We ARE assisting Ukraine and have been for the last 3 years. According to the MODs departmental accounts the UK spent £2.8 BILLION just on Ukraine in the year to April 2023. How are we supposed to keep up this level of spending on a war that looks like it will never end?

That reduction represents 0.2% gdp. That was going to be put towards the defence budget before US cut the funding to the Ukraine today.

It sounds like a lot doesn’t it?

We spent 40 billion on PIP/DLA alone. So we spent 5% on Ukraine of what we spent on this 1 type of benefit alone. And that’s to assist a country which is essentially the buffer between us and Russia. It’s not enough.

Exactly this. Divide and conquer whilst multi millionaires get all the tax breaks. Perhaps we should start going after all unpaid tax by these people and corporations.

Why hasn’t Labour done it then? Are they greedy/unprincipled? Or is it a bit more complex than you’re making out?

And we spent about 30 billion on HS2. How many more of these vanity projects could have been scrapped to spare some cash?

We could stop topping up wages with tax payers money, using cheap foreign labour and tax the rich.

@Wildflowers99 They haven’t even been in government a year yet. How quickly do you think these things can be done? PIP claimants take up a very small percentage of the revenue but let’s all pick on the weakest. Perhaps the lazy wheelchair users can get themselves on the front line.

HS2 was a massive fuck up but infrastructure isn’t something that receives too much funding in general and was supposed to be a one off spend rather than an ongoing thing. It’s not really comparable.

It’s still a ballsed-up waste of money tho.

This is the kind of hyperbole that I mean. What next; will you accuse me of wanting workhouses back so I can complete the bingo card? Labour aren’t a party of cutting welfare so when they do it you know we’re overspending, by a lot. It is our second biggest expenditure to the NHS, so it’s not only relevant to discuss it, it’s logical.

Agreed!

Tax the rich? We have the highest tax burden since just post ww2. Where have you been?