The glaringly obvious cuts that Starmer could make – but won’t

IT’S VERY hard to have any sympathy with the Prime Minister as he stalls in making sure adequate funds are available for our defence. Is he blind to the money he is wasting on non-essential things?

Labour have announced that £4.5billion will be spent on new walking and cycling routes, to ensure people prioritise ‘active travel’.

Their press release says: ‘New national targets announced by the Department for Transport will mean more than half of short journeys in towns and cities will be walked, wheeled or cycled by 2035.’We don’t appear to have any say in this!

This is all linked to the idiotic ideology of Net Zero of course but it’s doubtful that this cash came from Red Ed’s spending pot.

This year the UK has committed a further £752million plus drones etc to Ukraine; this is on top of other payments that came to more than £21billion. We could save a small fortune if only Starmer would stop whispering support to Zelensky, which would go a long way to bolstering our own defence, but I fear he is so anti-Russia that he wants the war to continue until the UK and EU armies are strong enough to join the war and really try to punish Russia.

Sensible commentators suggest that taking some money from the Net Zero budget would easily pay for a greatly enlarged defence budget, but Starmer has neither the will nor the balls to force Miliband to cough up. Instead he will make us sorry we even got interested in the subject as the rumour is that money will have to come from public services, the things we rely on most in our daily lives, though of course the welfare budget will never be starved of funds.

We all know how wasteful quangos are with overlapping criteria and expensive tastes – if only it stopped there. The following is a short list of regularly identified wasteful spending:

1. Failed IT projects and digital programmes – large NHS, Home Office and other IT systems that run over budget or are scrapped;
2. Procurement and contracting inefficiencies – single‑supplier contracts, lack of competition, scope creep and poor contract management across government;
3. Underused or empty government buildings and estates – offices and facilities not consolidated after hybrid working;
4. Poorly targeted tax reliefs and subsidies – reliefs that deliver little public benefit or are captured by those not intended to benefit;
5. Fraud, error and welfare overpayments – recoverable overpayments and weak verification in benefits systems;
6. Ineffective overseas aid or low‑value overseas programmes – projects with weak monitoring, high admin costs or limited measurable outcomes;
7. Local authority adult social care inefficiencies – fragmented commissioning, delayed transfers of care and variable procurement driving higher costs;
8. Military procurement overruns and capability delays – programmes with long delays and cost growth from requirements changes;
9. Energy and infrastructure project cost escalation – large projects where poor planning/contracting increases taxpayer exposure;
10. Redundant or duplicated regulatory programmes – overlapping reviews, advisory bodies or initiatives with unclear mandates.

So it seems there is plenty of scope for Starmer to get a grip on waste that could help fund better defence, but he won’t: he is too busy selling us out to the EU – more money wasted – and ‘building his legacy’. In any case the MoD are in such a farcical state that even if they had all the money they needed they would screw things up with poor contract provision or simply throwing money at obsolete or inferior equipment. 

 Ye Gods, how long does it take for one bungling Prime Minister to resign!