LAST week the government re-announced a pledge made two years ago by Boris Johnson to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP. This is a sensible commitment in a dangerous world, but where is the Conservative government going to find the money for this increase in military spending? Rishi Sunak says half of it will come from “returns on increased investment in research and development”.

Translation: Our national defence depends on boffins inventing something clever which makes huge amounts of money. Sounds to me rather like a “magic money tree”...

The other half of this new defence spending is meant to be coming from sacking 70,000 civil servants, but for the past eight years, the Civil Service has been getting bigger, not smaller:

Despite promising that Brexit would be “the easiest trade deal in history”, the government has had to employ an “army” of bureaucrats to do jobs which simply weren’t needed before. (New recruits to the Civil Service since Brexit actually outnumber the entire British Army!)

As well as requiring civil servants to negotiate the new trade deal with the EU, thousands more have been employed to process the millions of forms required for everything that crosses our borders, from food and manufactured goods to workers and students.

Meanwhile back on British soil, the number of Civil Servants working at DEFRA has reportedly doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 to cope with the tsunami of Brexit bureaucracy, including inventing a whole new farm support scheme to replace the EU Common Agricultural Policy. 

As members of the EU, we got the benefits of all their global trade deals without having to employ our own negotiating team. But after Brexit, every new international trade deal requires yet more civil servants. 

If the Conservatives are serious about funding the MoD by sacking civil servants, they needs to tell us which activities they're going to scrap; and if they really care about a safer future, they would restore our aid budget too. Instead, they propose new hare-brained schemes which will depend on even more Civil Servants, such as the judges, lawyers and court staff who will deport refugees to Rwanda, or the “health and work professionals” who will take over from GPs in writing sick notes and “helping people back into work”.

Only the Liberal Democrats are brave enough to say it: Brexit has been a massive waste of money. Rejoining the Single Market would boost our flatlining economy by four per cent, make life easier for Cornish farmers, exporters and employers, and eliminate Brexit bureaucracy, freeing up billions to invest in a stronger military and restore our foreign aid budget. That’s how we can build a fair, free and sustainable society.