Money To Burn

For retaining the two-child benefit cap, for withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment, for increasing employers' National Insurance contributions so has to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, for forcing working farmers of many decades' standing who formally inherited their parents' farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, for increasing workers' bus fares by 50 per cent, or for refusing to compensate the WASPI women, the argument has never been that we needed the money for "defence". It has always been that, due to the undeniably parlous state in which the public finances had been left by the last Government, we could "no longer afford it".

Yet now we can afford all the money in the world for the arms companies that employed the former Defence Ministers and top brass beloved of the court media, that will employ their successors, and that funded the grand-sounding official thinktanks that always all said exactly the same thing about every issue. Ostensibly all to stop a country that could not take Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking city less than 20 miles from the Russian border, from parking its tanks on the Atlantic coast, as it has never expressed the slightest desire to do. Still, at least we are not talking about the Thames Water bailout, or about the increase in the energy cap. What a stroke of luck.