Have I missed something, or has someone declared what the defence budget will be with the nuclear deterrent included?
According to press reports, that is going to be the case going forwards.
Wyler, excellent posts, well said.
For those that are interested in this sort of thing, various economic commentators have been discussing the gap between the amount of public sector savings that need to be made against the political viability of achieving cuts of this magnitude. Such discussions and articles can be found going back over a year and all were agreed that to realise the actual amounts, the savings would have to be on a never-seen-before scale.
There is still a school of thought that a lot of the rhetoric is aimed squarely at the money markets and that the cuts just are not do-able. I'm not so sure...from where I am sitting, they appear to have the bit between their teeth and enough of a popular mandate (primarily from a thoroughly pee'd off private sector) to change the face of public sector spending for a very long time.
Hang on to your hats, it's going to be a rough ride.