Spending review runs risk of ruining us

It is rich for Andrew Fleming (Labour) to attack the Conservatives for trying to make the best of the bad job inherited from Andrew’s party after 13 disastrous years of Gordon ‘Prudence’ Brown holding our nation’s purse strings (Letters 29/10/10). Don’t forget, it was his FSA which failed dismally in regulating the banks and their wayward lending.
By The Newsroom
Published 5th Nov 2010, 13:06 BST

As any parsimonious accountant will tell you, “don’t spend what you haven’t got; don’t sell your gold reserves at a knock down price and don’t print promissory notes (money) when you have nothing in the bank to back it up!” But then New Labour failed to carry out a spending review leaving an incoming government (they prayed it wouldn’t be them!) blind to the severity of the necessary cuts facing them. Far worse, Labour still has no viable solutions to the very mess they created.

While I have little time for today’s whimpish ‘Hug-a-Lib-Dem’ post-Thatcher Tories, I sympathise with the dilemma they face. However, their savage defence cuts under the Spending Review leave me speechless! Sell our only aircraft carrier, sell our versatile Harriers, sell half the Fleet leaving our pirate prone merchant shipping and the new aircraft carrier defenceless (they will have no air-defence), and abandon the airborne surveillance/ long-range maritime rescue Nimrods! Now they are talking of spending millions of pounds to convert one carrier to carry French Navy jets just in case the EU allows France to help us recover the Falklands, our other Protectorates, or overrule Spain in its unfounded sovereignty claims over Gibraltar!

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These defence cuts are insane for they are asking terrorists to hang-fire for 12 years! Yet, this is not half as insane as decimating our defence industry (one of Britain’s most important in terms of exports, employment, GDP and developing new technology) and then telling private enterprise that they will have to bail this country out (after three long years of deep recession) by developing ‘new technology and new jobs’ all the while being hamstrung by crippling EU employment legislation, when the very industry which drives technology - defence - is to be put out to grass!

If you thought that insane, then think on! Tony Blair surrendered Mrs Thatcher’s EU Rebate at a time when our coffers were empty, so we now pay an extra £0.6bn p/a (rising by a further £0.6bn next year) just to stay in the EU. Today, we are being told the EU wants another £0.9bn p/a so that the cosseted EU Commission can fulfil its Euro-fantasies in the lap of luxury! And now they want a new Direct EU Tax to fund their unaccounted spending!

‘Charity begins at home’. So it comes as no surprise that non-EU Norway is the most prosperous nation in Europe while we overtaxed Britons suffer squallor and poverty, languishing in 13th position behind the richer nett-beneficiaries of the EU budget! How can Mr Cameron continue to justify giving £15bn p/a to the EU in the midst of the most severe government spending cuts and job losses when we desperately need more Police, nurses, hospitals, servicemen and an effective Royal Navy to defend ourselves?

I pray sanity returns and we are given our EU Referendum while we still have a viable nation and economy worth defending.

Barry M Jones

Bixley Lane, Beckley

Related topics:New Labour