Leave it to the Editorial Board of Wall Street’s leading urinal to make that declaration in an editorial brazenly titled “God Save the British Military.” Wall Street’s Tories demand that spending on the British military be given top priority über alles, in what they evidently view as their “mother Country.” But the same must be done in all “Western” countries, they make clear.
The editorial opens: “The welfare state has become a national-security threat in Western democracies as it crowds out defense spending.” It closes: “This is the crisis of the Western welfare state in profile, and it comes at a perilous moment when global security threats are proliferating. Defense costs money, but undeterred wars are far more expensive.”
The rest is just details. Including such laments as that the share of defense spending in the U.K. budget in (the Cold War days of) 1955-56 was 7.6%, but by 2022-2023 had fallen to 2.2% of GDP, while “social and welfare” spending rose over the same period from 4.7% to 10.2%, and—horrors of all horrors!—healthcare spending rose from 2.8% to 8.4%.
