Boris Johnson will gladly spend billions on the military but can’t find money to feed Britain’s poorest children

Boris Johnson’s government can’t find £20m to feed poor British children over their school holidays, but it seems that there’s £16bn available to pour into the Ministry of Defence’s vast black hole.

The point was being made within seconds of the announcement of the biggest boost to defence spending for three decades, at time when councils are going bust, hospitals are running on fumes, and we are being told the government is going to have to embark on a renewed bout of belt tightening to pay for the Covid spending spree it’s had to indulge in.  

Of course, there’s politics at work here and the politics behind the announcement really aren’t all that hard to discern. Johnson’s relations with Tory MPs fell off a cliff while the baleful presence of Dominic Cummings was stalking the corridors of Downing Street, but there’s nothing like a boost to defence spending to warm Conservative cockles.  

There’s a certain type of Tory that still sees defence spending as the only good public spending full stop. Increasing it is a meaty bone to throw to disaffected Tory troops.  

“The defence of the realm must come first,” said the prime minister. Hear, hear, hear, hear, hear.  

Labour wasn’t going to fall into the trap of making the obvious point – there’s no cash for hungry kids, but a glut of the stuff to buy toys for the generals – for fear of leaving itself open to the charge of a lack of patriotism.  

But the four years over which this settlement will run should give it plenty of opportunities to jab at the government all the same.

Among other things, the cash is supposed to fund cyber defence and AI projects, which makes a lot of sense given the widely reported activities of hackers employed by hostile countries.  

Getting British troops better kit is also welcome. But it’s here that the queasiness about the MoD’s ability to deliver it should start to set in given the, shall we say, issues the MoD has had when it comes to procurement.  

Chuck in the promise of a new space command capable of launching a rocket by 2022 and that’s when anyone with their mind on matters financial will have felt their stomach lurching.  

It sometimes looks as if the MoD is to financial discipline what Dennis the Menace is to good behaviour awards.  

Here’s the National Audit Office on its 2017 to 2027 Equipment Plan: “The Ministry of Defence’s (the department’s) 10 year Equipment Plan is not affordable and does not provide a realistic forecast of the costs the department will have to meet over the next 10 years buying and supporting the equipment it has determined the Armed Forces need.”

Europhobic Tories always used to like to bang on about the EU’s budget not getting signed off. For the record, when fact checking charity Full Fact looked at the issue it discovered that auditors found the accounts have been largely accurate since 2007, although there were significant problems before that.  

The MoD’s accounts, on the other hand, have been qualified for the last 11 consecutive years. In the most recent outing, Gareth Davies, the Comptroller and Auditor General, found the department had “not accounted for the assets and liabilities arising from certain contracts in accordance with International Accounting Standard (IAS) 17” in applying his red pen once more.  

A public company with a record like that would be in stocks while its directors would be facing calls for their disqualification. But this is public money we’re talking about and when that gets “spaffed up the wall”, to quote the prime minister, it seems to elicit little more than a shrug.  

Right wingers like to justify calls to cut the international aid budget – which has been primed for the shears to help pay for this – by pointing to the odd dodgy project amid all the good it does.

The MoD has them coming out of its ears. It could easily waste many times more on poor procurement and lax financial discipline than it would cost to feed Britain’s hungry kids over multiple holidays.

I’m not saying defence of the realm isn’t important. It is, especially the cyber stuff. Ditto properly equipping the young people who put their lives on the line after joining up. If you could guarantee to me that the money would be spent on doing that I could be ok with this. But the government’s approach to procurement generally is riven with poor practice and mired in allegations of cronyism, even corruption, and the MoD’s record when it comes to public funds was frankly indefensible before Johnson pointed the magic money tree in its direction.  

So it’s not waving a white flag to raise a red one about this announcement. To the contrary.