THE Prime Minister must explain how the Government intends to fund the extra £75 billion it wants to spend on defence in the coming years, Labour’s Emily Thornberry has said.
The Shadow Attorney General said on GB News: “The Prime Minister yesterday essentially committed to spending another £75 billion on defence by 2030. They produced this 22-page document and not a single line of it was on where their money was coming from now.
“Hopefully, it'll come in the near future, just like we're hoping that they're going to give us the details on the £46 billion that is going to cost them to get rid of National Insurance. They haven't given us any details on that either.
“As we get closer to an election, we're going to get more and more…they want to get to spend money, they need to tell us where the money is going to come from.”
In a discussion with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, she continued: “What they do is they announce these things and then they don't do them. They have been announcing cutting back on the number of civil servants for the last two years…they haven't actually been doing it.
“And of course, a lot of these people are not Treasury bean counters. They're people like in the department that I shadow, which are prosecutors in magistrates’ courts, or people who are supposed to be making decisions about who can come into the country to claim asylum.
“Many of these jobs are actually of huge value, but they don't make any decisions at all. All they do is make these announcements and then don't follow through.
“What you need to do is actually measure them by what they do, and not just what they say.
“Look at the fact that the number of people in the Army is smaller than it was in the time of Napoleon, look at the fact that they've wasted £15 billion on procurement in the last few years. I mean, this is the reality of the situation.”
