I will be presenting a budget today which will not cut welfare spending and will support the 18 million poorest and most vulnerable people in this country. How can I do this?
Stop the War Coalition
4 December 2012
I AM HAPPY TO TELL the House today that, having looked again at the figures, I will not after all be cutting a further £10 billion from the welfare budget.
In addition, I am able to announce that I will be restoring the £18 billion that I cut from welfare spending in my previous budget.
I will be presenting a budget today which will support the 18 million poorest and most vulnerable people in this country. Instead of the poorest families losing over £1000 a year, I am returning welfare support to the levels they were before this government was elected.
How can I do this?
First, I am announcing today that Britain will withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan immediately, saving the country around £6 billion a year.
The Prime Minister has already informed President Obama that this government now regards the war in Afghanistan as utterly pointless and unjustified and, as it never served any British interest, we are not going to continue sending troops to kill and be killed in a war which is so obviously lost.
President Obama's response has been somewhat acrimonious, with talk of the "special relationship" between our two countries now being is tatters.
But since that "special relationship" has in the last ten years taken Britain into the disastrous and illegal war in Iraq and the imperial adventure in Libya -- and even now threatens to drag us into a war on Iran which would have catastrophic consequences for the world -- the government does not think ending it will be much of a loss.
Bringing the troops home will also mean no more soldiers having life-changing injuries, such as loss of limbs or eyes, or suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or acute depression, with all the costs this entails for our health and social services.
And there will be fewer soldiers and ex-forces personnel who finish up in prison, who at present account for around ten percent of the prison population, with each one of them costing 100,000 a year to keep behind bars.
Ending our slavish support for America's war policies will also mean we can cut the huge costs spent on counter-terrorism, since people whose countries we have invaded, or whose religion and culture has been characterised as "uncivilised", will no longer be full of anger and resentment against us -- which was the motivation for most acts of terror in this country.
Counter-terrorism policies are costing us £4 billion annually. So with that saving, we have reached at least £10 billion a year which I will not have to cut from the welfare budget.
But we still need to raise another £18 billion. Where is that coming from?
A further billion pounds will be saved by the government's decision today to stop subsidising arms sales by private companies -- which we are no longer reluctant to call merchants of war -- whose iniquitous trade facilitates mass slaughter in dozens of countries and props up dictators and tyrants across the globe.
So we now have a total of £11 billion we no longer need to cut. But let us keep going.
Britain has the fourth largest defence budget in the world, spending currently around £40 billion a year, which is at least 2.5% of our GDP. As we no longer intend to posture as a mini-superpower trying -- as David Cameron put it -- "to punch above our weight in the world", and as we will no longer be joining in imperialist wars attacking other countries, the government has decided there is no reason why Britain should be spending proportionate to our GDP any more than Germany (1.4%), Brazil (1.6%), Netherlands (1.5%), Sweden (1.2%) or Denmark (1.4%). This will enable us to reduce our military spending by £10 billion.
And as this will be our new policy, we no longer have to fund obscenely expensive military hardware, such as the two aircraft carriers we are building at a cost of £3 billion each, even though we do not have any aircraft that can use them. If we ever decided to buy planes to use these carriers, it would cost an estimated £30 billion, but obviously we will not need to go down that path, as we are scrapping the carriers.
So we now have over £21 billion we can use to protect welfare services.
We can immediately add another £2.2 billion, which is the annual cost of maintaining the Trident nuclear missile system. The government has decided to scrap Trident immediately, as it serves no military purpose whatever and we can now admit we have no idea who the "enemy" is we're supposed to be deterring with these weapons of mass destruction.
The truth is, this government -- like all British governments over the past 60 years -- has kept these abominable weapons at huge cost because it was thought it enabled Britain to posture round the world, once again to use David Cameron's phrase, "punching above its weight". We have come to realise that this posturing is just making us look silly and hated by many countries.
So, at around £23 billion we are now tantalisingly close to our £28 billion target.
I can now announce -- and this is the big one -- that the government has cancelled the plan to replace Trident with another nuclear system at the ludicrous cost of at least £100 billion, and these savings will be used to safeguard our public services.
This clearly makes any reduction in welfare services utterly redundant for the foreseeable future.
The policies which I announced in previous budgets threatened to put the clock of social progress in this country back 70 years. I have shown today that there is in fact no need to cut a penny from welfare spending.
I therefore recommend this budget to the House and trust it will receive the unqualified support of all honourable members of parliament.
