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Defence Investment Plan

At last, we have agreement on a defence expenditure statistic. When the Secretary of State says that what the settlement means is that the proportion of GDP spent on defence by the end of this decade will now be higher than at any time in the past 30 years, he is quite right. The trouble is that if we go back 30 years to 1995, what we were spending then under the new accounting rules was 3% of GDP, and that was six years after the fall of the Berlin wall. Given that we are now in a more dangerous situation today than at any time since at least the height of the cold war in the 1980s, should we not be looking at the sort of percentages we spent then? Under the new accounting rules, that was between 4.1% and 5.5%. Haven’t we still got a long way to go?