YOU couldn’t make it up if you tried: the news this week of this Tory government’s so-called ‘Defence Review’.

Here we are in the middle of government Covid alleviation spending and a total national debt now topping £1.8 trillion, and what do we plan to spend further on in the years ahead?

Not climate emergency, nor social services, resource depletion, environment, NHS and migration emergencies to avoid the looming ‘sixth extinction’ but, as much as it beggars belief, on yet more nuclear bombs and Trident submarine-launched intercontinental missiles, costing hundreds of billions of scarce public funds.

And this in a world where, via the UN, an international treaty signed by most nations to ban nuclear bombs was confirmed just last January - albeit with the UK refusing - AND all countries remaining tied to the previously agreed Nuclear Non-Proliferation International Treaty of 1968 which bans all new nuclear bomb provisions or activities.

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BUT, as much as we all want mutual disarmament, friendship and peace, we all now know via Brexit Withdrawal and Irish Protocol agreements made by PM Johnson recently, and then reversed, he cannot be trusted to keep to international treaties even when signed in good faith.

This defence review, again unlike others, promises to spend more.

The strategy behind all this big spending is to make Britain look ‘great again’ in its new Tory post-Brexit ‘global’ role, but accompanying it with big cuts in overseas aid shows old ‘nasty party’ returning, with fictional global military status more important than tackling poverty at home or abroad.

It all begs the questions: what or who in Covid world is ‘defence’ against?

Why can’t there be a new ‘peace’ UK department fighting for love and disarmament?

Alan Debenham
TAUNTON