Taking Generals at their word is why Britain is undefended

Imagine for a second that the health service was run in the same way as the Ministry of Defence. Senior NHS managers would have been found over and over again to have been wasteful, inefficient, lacking transparency, insufficiently concerned about large-scale fraud and repeatedly incapable of managing its own budgets.

Now imagine that the firewall between those senior NHS managers and the corporations identified as driving the inefficiency and fraud was not only permeable but barely there at all. Senior managers appear to have all-but merged with the sources of fraud and inefficiency via a revolving door which rewards the managers personally but only at the taxpayer's expense.

Now imagine those same managers tell you that the way to clear the backlog of waiting lists in cancer care and heart disease is to 'enhance the reputation of the service' by buying its management class sports cars.

Then if anyone raises the question of whether sports cars are actually effective in reducing cancer waiting lists, the managers tells that person that they are ignorant, irresponsible and putting the lives of every citizen at direct risk, making the speaker somewhere between dangerously naïve and a traitor.

And this is the final point; to question whether to give the health service managers money for whatever they want whenever they ask is in itself to fail the health of the nation. If every other department isn't cut at will whenever newspapers have stories about ill health, Ministers walk out and repeat all of the above narrative.

This is where we are today with defence. The military never take any responsibility for inflaming global tensions but expect to profit quickly when global tensions rise. They get to define what those tensions mean, they get to define 'the only way' it is permitted to discuss how to mitigate the risks of a dangerous world. If they say it requires a nuclear submarine, the public is not meant to question that.

But it is this lack of scrutiny and this 'government by slogan, policy by corporation' approach to defence which has led us here in the first place. The arms corporations and whichever General is sitting on their board this week have successfully sold the British Government an endless inventory of very expensive and largely over-priced military equipment.

And despite ever-growing public opposition to foreign militarism, what the defence establishment demands is the capacity to 'join our allies' in foreign militarism. To be clear, closing the Strait of Hormuz is a threat to the wellbeing of Britain – but it is not a threat that will be resolved by the UK spending vast sums of money on aircraft carriers.

After all, the Strait of Hormuz is currently closed and we are not realistically using any of our very expensive foreign power projection infrastructure to do anything about it. And if events beyond our shores are to be treated as urgent national security threats that require the redirection of enormous sums of taxpayer money, why is climate change or food insecurity not getting anything like the same attention as nuclear-powered submarines? Lack of profits?

This is the dilemma; Common Weal very much believes that in a world made unstable by 'great powers' jostling for control of resources, it is easier to create a better society if the population feels secure and defended. A real capacity to address any real threats to our wellbeing which we can realistically do anything about is something we support. That means territorial defence and UN peacekeeping.

What it does not mean is more blank cheques for a group of people who have demonstrated no capacity whatsoever for strategic planning, efficient financial management or the ability to avoid fraud. And it cannot mean that we as a society must hand over money but be excluded from any conversation about how that money should be used or what our security actually involves.

When a Minister of Defence resigns in Britain it is seen as a national crisis, because everything in defence and security is about hype and scare stories, not analysis and awareness of the track record of performance.

Defence spending has increased in real terms since 2013 but troop numbers have decline by a quarter since 2010 and the redundant British nuclear programme is greatly over budget and behind schedule. The debate about defence cannot be allowed only to be about how much we spend. It is time to ask much harder questions about how it is spent – and who is spending it.