logo
UK Military Rhetoric Doesn't Match Fiscal Reality

UK Military Rhetoric Doesn't Match Fiscal Reality

Bloomberg07-06-2025
Not long before World War I, HMS Dreadnought, a battleship that made all existing vessels obsolete, was launched at Portsmouth in the presence of the King-Emperor Edward VII. Fire-breathing patriots soon took up the cry, 'We want eight and we won't wait.' Winston Churchill, then a young home secretary in a government committed to spending more on welfare, wryly noted of the popular clamor for a naval race with Germany: 'The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.'
British debates about defense spending follow a familiar trajectory, although this time it's politicians, rather than civilians, insisting that more should be spent on firepower. A military revolution in warfare is underway, too. Drones, off-the-shelf technology far cheaper than Dreadnoughts, are being deployed to lethal effect on the battlefields of Ukraine and further afield - the daring 'Spider Web' raid last weekend destroyed as much as a third of Russia's strategic bombing force based thousands of miles away from Europe.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Culture minister says ‘biggest anxiety' is public service broadcasters' budgets
Culture minister says ‘biggest anxiety' is public service broadcasters' budgets

Yahoo

time2 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Culture minister says ‘biggest anxiety' is public service broadcasters' budgets

Culture minister Sir Chris Bryant has said his 'biggest anxiety' when it comes to the British TV industry is the reduced budgets of public service broadcasters (PSBs). The commissioning budgets of PSBs have been 'squeezed by the real-terms reduction of the BBC licence fee', as well as a reduction in advertising revenue, according to a report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) Committee published earlier in the year. The MP also spoke about the Government's rejection of a streamer levy, after the report called for platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund which would help PSBs through financing drama with a specific interest to British audiences. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, he said: 'We want to get a mixed economy. I love the fact that the streamers and big Hollywood houses make lots of shows in the UK … I want to mix it, to be making our own stuff.' Speaking about the importance of 'a mixed economy', he said: 'Film and TV, and high-end television in particular is fundamentally an international thing. 'I think that some politicians in the world don't seem to fully understand us, but one of the things I've been trying to achieve in the UK is, yes, it's great that the streamers do make fabulous stuff here, and lots of wonderful films made here. 'Tom Cruise is probably one of the biggest investors in the UK economy over the last decade. Brilliant. 'I really want to celebrate that, but I don't want everything that is made in the UK, all the IP (intellectual property), simply to go back to the West Coast of the United States of America. 'I'd like us to have some IP that remains here so that we can continue making investments and have strong UK production companies, which also make stuff which maybe sometimes is specifically made for a UK audience as well as for a wider audience. 'So I've been trying to make that mixed economy.' Cruise's blockbuster Mission Impossible films, particularly recent instalments, have frequently filmed in the UK, with locations including London, Derbyshire and the Lake District. Sir Chris added: 'My biggest anxiety is the state of public service broadcasting budgets, and if they haven't got any funding, they're not going to be making any progress.' After the report into British film and high-end television, chairwoman of the CMS committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said 'there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens' unless the Government intervenes to 'rebalance the playing field' between streamers and public service broadcasters (PSBs).

Editorial: Allies to the rescue — European leaders try to keep Trump on the correct side in Ukraine/Russia war
Editorial: Allies to the rescue — European leaders try to keep Trump on the correct side in Ukraine/Russia war

Yahoo

time2 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Editorial: Allies to the rescue — European leaders try to keep Trump on the correct side in Ukraine/Russia war

It's not often that you have eight European leaders, including one whose country is at war, descend on Washington in as close to an unplanned snap visit as you can get. Let's hope that the White House visit convinced the White House resident of the importance of the moment. Monday afternoon, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was joined by the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., Finland, the European Commission and NATO in a surprise summit following President Donald Trump's Alaska meeting with Russian despot Vladimir Putin. Trump seems to have understood the Oval Office meeting as him, the genius dealmaker, convening the allies after a successful rendezvous with the Russian adversary, bringing everyone together in advance of brokering the peace deal that will win him the Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever it takes; and that perception was likely reinforced by the heavy praise heaped on him, though of course he doesn't grasp that his NATO counterparts have internalized the fact that flattery is the only language Trump will listen to. That and English, which fortunately they all speak well enough to have been able to tag team off each other without translators in bringing Trump around on not selling out Europe to an imperialist Russia, something European leaders probably did not expect to have to be doing 80 years after the end of WWII. In actuality, this was more like the adults rushing to stop a toddler who had announced his intention to put a fork in the light socket before any further damage could be done. They certainly all watched in horror as Trump accomplished little but once again parroting Putin talking points after rolling out the red carpet for his admired authoritarian on U.S. soil, a meeting at which the Ukrainians were not represented. This after having spent days talking about the possibility of ceding Ukrainian territory as part of some sort of agreement, and chastising Ukraine — invaded unprovoked by a much larger neighbor — of starting the war itself. At least this frenzied intervention by our European friends does seem to have yielded some success, primarily in the form of Trump agreeing to some form of U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine, which are likely to be the only thing that actually incentivizes Putin to back off and stay back when a peace deal is reached. Something akin to NATO's core Article 5 on joint defense comes to mind. The problem is that such guarantees are only really worth anything if they're credible; it is fundamentally a threat, and threats are meaningful when the target has reason to believe there will be follow-through. Unfortunately, we can't say that we expect Trump to stick to this message discipline. Given everything that we've seen so far in this administration, odds are that shortly Trump will be insisting that Ukraine handle its own affairs or that the U.S. will only provide security guarantees in exchange for some kind of pay or materials deal; either that or he'll simply back off from the position altogether. Even if he then comes around again, every time Trump wobbles on dead-serious international commitments, including support for the NATO alliance itself, it saps at their ultimate credibility and therefore makes them less potent. We guarantee this: neither Trump nor any of us want to live in the world in which Putin believes he is not going to face consequences for his aggressive expansionist agenda. Trump made the commitments, now prove us wrong by sticking to them. _____

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store