Would the tories actually increase the defence budget?
The UK had a strictly cold war defencive force before Blair. Now we have carriers to go round the world to attack people, and mine resistant vehicles to help us deal with hostile populations (is this really progress). I’m a Tory, and support both defence spending and better pay for the troops, but the character of the UK armed forces has been changed from one of defence to expeditionary warfare, and I’m not very happy about that. The issue for me is not the spending as such, as the nature of the forces we will soon have. Blair kept up his interventions (which got riskier and riskier as time went on) until Iraq blew up in his face. The armed forces he leaves behind are an open invitation for future politicians to do the same. The Tories may pull things back just to remove the danger of ideological interventionism putting us in the middle of perpetual war.
