That was the question asked of the Great (and parsimonious) British public in a moneysavingexpert.com poll. It appears the public are overwhelmingly supportive of the armed forces, until they see the bill.

Defence (31%) came a close second to Social Protection (Pensions, benefits etc) (32%), for cuts. It seems the Government may well be our best friend, after all.

Poll Results Here

We are a representative democracy for a very good reason.

Just start again. No cuts, just reevaluate the whole 9 yards.

Start at the basics:

Defence: No point in having anything else if one cannot defend the UK. TOP PRIORITY.
Law & Order: Having defended one's nation, it had better be orderly. Make prisons into businesses. Have them be self funding. Free labour force makes for competitive advantage. For prisoners, productive work means privileges. Like visits, TV on a Sunday etc.
Education: Better provide for the citizens of tomorrow with meaningful qualifications. Not MA(Hons) in Tree Hugging. How about MSc(Hons) in Propulsion Technology. Or BEng(Hons) in Electrical Engineering.
Health: Bin the NHS entirely. Use small proportion of former NHS budget to fund healthcare for those that truly cannot afford it. Bin NI contributions in line with lack of need for same.
Benefits: What are those? For the truly destitute, give them a roof & food (communal). But that is IT.

Smaller government, smaller taxes, more relevant services.

Reintroduce plain authoritative English. eg "I write to inform you that your benefit claim has been denied, in accordance with s34 of the Benefit Act 1983, as amended".

Not "We are writing to you because we said we would do so within 7 days, and we're sorry to have to tell you that you haven't met the standards that allows us to pay you benefit. But if you reapply in 31 days, you will have, and we'll be able to pay you 156 pounds a week".

Making cuts in the existing framework is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Much better to accept this boat is fcuked and think about designing a better boat.

Quite disappointing, but not that suprising. The public just don't see defense for what it is. Because jerry isn't across the channel, they don't see the point in committing resources.

They don't see that we are already dramatically underfunded, we have been committed to 5 conflicts since NL came to power, 2 of which were major war-fighting (let's face it), whilst we've seen the defense budget rise BELOW INFLATION. This is scandalous. Not only can the country afford more, it owes it to the blokes out there to pay more, and the thinking man says that our armed forces are a good investment, a blue water Navy is wholly in the national interest, and we need a bigger Army if we are going to maintain our standing in the world.

Where can we find the money? Where needs to be cut?
The bulbous civil service for a start, including Quangos etc, then Europe (costs us 60 billion a year), then the welfare state (but keep the NHS, with dramatic reforms, make it a national service rather than this creaking beurocracy it has become (trust me, I know people who work in the NHS, the system is diabolical.), and how about rolling back devolution? Any less cnut politicos on the take will be a good saving. And across the whole state sector emphasise trift, they don't need modern art, they don't need super-duper chairs etc.



Unfortunately, I may as well have chalked all that on the back of my toilet door for all the good it will do, I'm preaching to the converted while the vast majority of the public are ignorant to where money is apporpriate to be spent. What was it Churchil said? "Democracy is the worst form of Government... apart from all the others"?

Please don't be too disheartened;I wish to record my total agreement with ALL the above;loved the bit about quangos especially since all they do is subvert democracy at huge expense to the taxpayer.And why do we NEED(??)600-plus MPs when the overwhelming majority of our legislation originates from that bloated and fraudulent plutocracy called the EU?The most vulnerable portfolios are those which have no tangible means of self-defence e.g.Defence,and come the aftermath of the next General Election,the new Chancellor will have some serious decisions to make when the question of public expenditure is raised,which it will very quickly.Why Defence?Simple-very few votes in it,as well as the reasons mentioned in earlier posts.

If the the treasury stopped borrowing so much money and sorted out their debt interest of 28bn ,Just think what extra equipment and man power the armed forces could receive .

Were I a one eyed Scottish retard, I'd cut back on my throat, doing the honourable thing.

The problem is that you are wrong. It can't.

The other cuts you propose would be a good start, but any idea that the money will go anywhere other than towards paying off our now MASSIVE debt is cloud-cuckoo-land.

It's the new reality, my friend. Time to get used to it: there will be no more money for Defence from Lab, Con, Lib Dem, or anyone else. And probably a lot less.

Like it or lump it, I'm afraid.

"It's the new reality, my friend. Time to get used to it: there will be no more money for Defence from Lab, Con, Lib Dem, or anyone else. And probably a lot less. "

Bluntly, there will be no new money for anything else apart from health and education, regardless of who wins the election. We are in immense financial difficulties, with a PM who is in total denial, and we have mortgaged our long term fiscal security to ensure that Kyle and Jaynessha can get their weeekly X-Box 360 money (sorry benefits).

My view - cut the welfare state - our people live in relative, not absolute poverty. Most people on benefits have roofs over their head, shelter, food (to the point of excess) and a electronic lifestyle that most 3rd world people can only dream of. They are only relatively poor to the middle classes, and the way NL fecked up, they now appear to have more disposable incomce than the middle class.

Make welfare to keep you from absolute poverty and leave it there. Also link benefits to value to the state - have a sliding scale of welfare payments linked to how long you've worked or done activity of value to the state. work for 10 years, get a 10 year level payout, work for 30 get an even bigger payout. Don't work, then get sweet FA except food parcels and bills paid.

Agree with flagrant violater's last but would do Mandelson's throat before doing the honourable deed to myself.

Politicians and the word honourable in the same sentence. You don't see that too often.

At the nape.

Our foreign aid budget is around 7 to 11 billion a year, depending on how you count it. India still receives foreign aid, and that country has a feckin' space programme.

Is it even the business of a government to spend the tax money it raises on services in foreign countries? I'd argue no, it isn't. But even if we will continue to feed billions to corrupt third world governments in the blithe hope that at least some will reach the people that need it, when our own finances are in such a dire state this spending has to be reduced.

I would help the needy. ------- And bash the greedy!!

India also has nuclear weapons,nuclear submarines and is just about to commence construction of nuclear power stations.

Add to that they have one of the largest militaries in the world,then this is one country we should NOT be giving any aid to.

Foreign aid-money being taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries.

1)Fire anyone who's job title includes words like Diversity, Equality etc.

2)Make HMP far more Spartan; no tv's, radios, free gyms etc. All of this stuff to be taken out of the jails and flogged off.

No special diets for religious reasons. Basic diet for every inmate except when mediacl conditions make that impossible. The rest can eat or fcuking starve.

3)Slash and burn the Benefits: only people physically incapable of doing ANY work, i.e. parapalegic, to get Benefits for doing nothing. Everyone else gets three months to find a job on full benefits. After that, they have to do hard, demeaning work, for example scraping chewing-gum of the streets.

4)And this includes Child Support etc. NO Benefits for single mothers; either pay for the little b@stard yourself or keep your legs closed. No more free housing for the nighbourhood bike.

5)SLash the Aid Budget tot he absolute bare minimum. I don't give a fcuk if every man, woman and child in Africa starves to death or dies of AIDS. Not our Colonies, not our fcuking problem.

Same goes for India; you can afford a Space Programm, you can afford to look after your own people. Or they can fcuk off and dier as well. We can always build new call centres...

Take my neighbours, nice enough people but they don't do 'work'.

Neither of the parents have worked in a decade. Both receive full SS benefits and mobilty allowance, both are somewhat obese. Their house is not some shithole either, well kept and a nice garden with patio and all the trimmings.

They have 4 kids, all grown up. The three girls are all on relationship umpteen with between 3 and 6 kids. None of the mothers ever worked, all have council houses, all on benefits with transitory 'baby fathers' coming and going. Most of the kids are diagnosed with 'ADHD' and they receive extra benefits for them. The youngest, their son, is doing time for armed robbery to pay for his drug habit and he also gets extra benefits as he's got assorted mental issues. The eldest girl grandchild, age 15, has just had her first kid, two of the teenage grandsons are baby fathers too.

So we have three generations where living on benefits is now the norm, not one of the extended family has been in employment for a decade, and the cycle is being repeated with the current teenage generation.


Now some ones paying for that extended families benefits that must be into the hundreds of thousands a year and that some one is the shrinking workforce. We can't go on like this.

I think the MOD could lop MILLIONS off its own budget if it really wanted to, lots of fat to trim. Think of all those staff cars, drivers, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, official entertaining - and that is before any other questionable expenditure. Are we much better than MPs ?

In answer to the thread's question:

Approximately in the middle of the throats of:

Brown; Mandelson; Harman; Hewitt; Hodge; Hain - most definitely; Milliband x 2; Prescott; Straw; Blears; Mr. Taylor of Warwick and Bliar (Mr and Mrs).

I wonder if you take away all the spin and smokescreening by the government how close are we to being in complete ruin? well not complete ruin but shitestate? perhaps starting afresh is not such a bad idea.

I think the basis of a successful working country is there it just has been riddled by mis-management/fatcats/corrupt governments for so long that they are a shadow of what they are supposed to be (the nhs and armed forces off the top of me head )

How much money would we save by cutting back the unneccesary fat on all parts of the public services and organisations? billions maybe.
Enough for a few chinooks anyways.

There's a simple point here. The Military are public servants. We are paid by the Taxpayer to do jobs. (And pay taxes ourselves)

The legions of benefits claimants are ALSO public servants, paid by the taxpayer to do.... Feck all.

The Taxpayer (i.e, me) has a claim on the benefit recipient. He/She /It gets my cash. I don't mind, I've signed on myself in the past. What I want and expect is that the State extracts some sort of work for the cash. I don't care if its cleaning ditches, building roads, cleaning Sellafield with a toothbrush... If they don't like being at the State's becak and call... Find a job elsewhere.

No workee, no payee.