[mike_hearn]

That framing makes it sound like high defense and welfare spending are laws of physics, impassable mountains you just have to navigate around. They aren't, they're very specific political choices that can be changed quickly and easily once the will is there. If you're going to pin your hope on a "political reformer" who can "sell" to the electorate, you'd do better to hope for one that can sell lower entitlements and defense spending.

[rwmj]

In reality changing defence and welfare spending is pretty hard here in the UK. Most of the welfare budget is spent on pensioners, who vote in droves. And defence spending is non-negotiable and in fact needs to be greatly increased if we're not to get rolled over by Russia. There's no amount of will that can help.

[hollerith]

I can understand being afraid of the Russians up until about 2025, but now that we've seen how they perform in a large war (alternative, now that we know that the state of the art in war has swing to favor the defending side) I don't get the fear.

The conventional wisdom is that the Cold War ended in 1991. George Friedman prefers to put the end of the Cold War in 2024 or 2025 when it became common knowledge that the Russians just didn't have much military strength.

Before Feb 2022 we didn't have any conclusive way to determine its strength, so a prudent military strategy would have been to assume that the Russian military was strong -- until 2024 or 2025, when a well-run country in Europe would have realized that it is safe to lower its defense spending (except Ukraine of course and to a lesser extent Moldova, Georgia and maybe the Baltic states and Finland).

[Balgair]

I mean, the UK isn't in danger of invasion by Russia. Even Finland barely is. Ukraine is currently invaded and Russia seems to be a bit stuck in the mud.

The UKs threat from adversarys is nuclear, nearly nothing else.

Now the threats to the UKs interests abroad are larger and may necessitate a large military, of course.