Maybe we spend far too much on defence?

Tuesday-Thursday blog

All the mainstream media are saying it – “The world is becoming much more dangerous so Britain needs to spend more on defence”. And as we found out during the Covid lab-leaked plague disaster and are slowly finding out about the man-made climate apocalypse global boiling nonsense, when all the mainstream media agree on something, it must be true. Mustn’t it?

Being a really boring person who still believes that facts are possibly more important than feelings, I decided to look at which countries spend the most on defence. Here are the facts from 2022 for the top ten defence budgets, though clearly Russian defence spending will have hugely increased since then:

• USA – $811bn; China – $298bn; India – $81bn; Saudi Arabia – $73bn; Russia – $72bn; UK – $70bn; Germany – $58bn; France – $57bn; Japan – $54bn; South Korea – $50bn

If these figures are in any way near accurate, this means that the UK – a small, wet, dismal, overpopulated, multi-culturally-enriched island floating pointlessly off the European mainland – has the world’s 6th largest military budget. Yet the powers that be and their useless, lying, self-serving prostitutes in the mainstream media bleat on about how we desperately need to increase military spending while beating the war drums with the spectre of a coming war with Russia.

The “NHS’s Money-Spaffing Syndrome”

The NHS’s budget in 2022/3 was around £182bn. That’s more than £6,000 for every taxpayer. And what do we get for this massive amount of money? If we just take the NHS England, in the last 10 years:

• The number of doctors increased by 37,467 (+37%) from 101,137 in 2013 to 138,604 by 2023

• The number of nurses/midwives increased by 68,063 (+23%) from 295,163 in 2013 to 363,226 in 2023

• The number of scientific staff increased by 42,938 (+13%) from 123,912 in 2013 to 166,850 in 2023

• The number of support staff increased by 125,510 (+45%) from 279,579 in 2013 to 405,089 in 2023

• The number of infrastructure staff increased by 62,758 (+41%) from 152,437 in 2013 to 215,195 in 2023

• The number of ambulance staff increased by just 1,721 (+10%) from 17,537 in 2013 to 19,258 in 2023

We should welcome the increase in the number of medically-trained employees. But perhaps we should question why NHS England has felt it wise to increase the number of bureaucrats by 125,510 (+45%) and the number of infrastructure staff by 62,758 (+41%) in just 10 years. Maybe the NHS is geting so much money that it has no problem wasting billions on useless penpushers and other unnecessary garbage? For example, I estimate the NHS has around 800 employees pushing diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) nonsense plus another couple of hundred dedicated to the making the NHS greener to save the planet idiocy.

The latest example of the NHS spaffing millions down the drain is the NHS introducing electric ambulances which will probably spend much of their time and their crews’ time having their batteries charged and so be unable to respond to 999 calls. The NHS claims that these milk-floats pretending to be ambulances can work for a full 12-hour shift. But they have an awful lot of equipment running off the battery – airconditioning, medical devices and so on. The “official range” of EVs is not based in reality. Only on the first day out of the factory (if it’s sunny, with no wind, temps between 15-20C, on a straight stretch road with no hills) would an electric ambulance ever live up to its range expectations. Moreover, battery power reduces with age and EV users are warned that batteries should only be charged up to 80%. So if these wonderful ambulances can do a 12-hour shift on a full battery charge, this means they can only do 9.6 hours with the recommended 80% battery charge. And if it’s a hot or cold or rainy day, the effective functioning hours will be even fewer.

What if the NHS fired these thousand or so DIE and greeny waste-of-skins? That would save over £100m which could be used for something old-fashioned like patient care.

Then there are the 188,268 non-medical staff hired by the NHS over the last 10 years. What about sacking a third of those? That would give another £5bn to £6bn in savings. Then the NHS wouldn’t be short of money at all.

There were newspaper stories last week claiming the NHS was the aspect of Britain that most people were proud of and that most people felt we should increase spending on the NHS. I humbly suggest that the NHS os drowning in an ocean of our money much of which is wasted and that the NHS’s budget should be cut by 2% to 3% a year every year and the useless buffoons running our NHS should be forced to find these savings from reducing the number of non-medical staff and scrapping all the pointless and costly initiatives launched by these pointless staff to justify their excessive salaries and pensions.

Has our military got “The NHS’s Money-Spaffing Syndrome”?

That brings us to that other great cistern into which we pour billions every year – the Ministry of Defence. Virtually every purchasing project run by the worse-than-incompetent Ministry of Defence (MoD) has come in years late and vastly over budget:

• The UK’s nuclear deterrent costs were £38bn (62%) over budget. I believe that’s the rocket which was recently launched as a yesy from a submarine and managed to get a couple of hundred metere into the air before flopping into the sea never to be seen again
• The two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers cost nearly double the original £3.9 billion estimate. Initially due in 2012, the first did not come into service until 2017, while the second was two years later. Though both have been bedevilled by mechanical problems and although one did apparently eventually join a NATO military exercise, I have a feeling (but I might be wrong) that there weren’t any aircraft aboard, just a few helicopters. Yet there’s a clue about what these massively-expensive white elephants should be doing in the name ‘aircraft carrier’. They’re not called ‘helicopter carriers’ for a reason
• The budget for the navy’s Astute class of submarines also roughly doubled, while its six Type 45 destroyers cost 30% more than planned and were two years late
• A long planned upgrade to the Warrior armoured vehicle was scrapped in March, after £430m had been spent on an attempt to upgrade the weapon and turret of the vehicle. Lacking a stabilised gun, the Warrior could not fire while moving, identified as a major problem as long ago as during the first Gulf war
• Britain’s £31bn replacement for its ageing Vanguard class Trident nuclear submarines has been plagued by delay since first approved in 2007. The first submarine was initially due to come into service in 2024, then 2028, and now the “early 2030s” according to the MoD

In fact, I have been writing about the Ministry of Defence’s catastrophic mismanagement of its military procurement since my 2006 book Plundering The Public Sector and also in my 2008 book Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money. And in those 18 years since Plundering the Public Sector, despite numerous damning reports from the National Audit Office and hundreds of millions spent on management consultants, there appears to have been absolutely no improvement in the Ministry of Defence’s performance.

I have been fortunate enough to work in almost 100 organisations in both the private and public sectors in 15 countries. And I understand that when you throw money at any bureaucracy, at least 30% will be wasted. Many times I have seen bureaucracies finding that they have some money left at the end of the financial year. So they desperately try to find whatever nonsense they can to spend that money because if they don’t, they’re afraid their budget for the next year will be reduced. Whereas if they manage to overspend, they can demand a budget increase for the next year by claiming they didn’t get enough money. This leads to enormous amounts of profligacy and waste (usually of our taxes).

Many people may believe that the answer to the problems in the NHS and our military is to hose ever more billions of our money into these two abjectly-failing organisations. Another approach might be to impose annual budget cuts to force some financial dicipline and managerial control onto the profligate, bungling incompetents who make an excellent living at our expense from failing to run these organisations?