Chris Gray
speaker
586 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Chris Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
We've already talked about the defence investment plan, the DIP.
That is this financial plan for the military for the next few years, running into the tens of billions potentially, which will both deal with increases in costs for things that the MOD were already doing anyway.
So inflation and rising costs, but also to implement the defence review, which was done for the government last year.
Exactly.
About the future of what our armed forces looks like.
Exactly.
So the defence review was done and published pretty much a year ago.
Then there was the whole business of how you pay for it.
And there's all sorts and a huge level of complexity and detail here.
But the big picture is one of the kind of obvious international backdrop and a widespread sense that...
Countries like ours need to spend more on defence.
A commitment that the government has made to NATO, to the Defence Alliance, to get to 3.5% of our national income being spent on core defence, as it's described, by 2035.
The government's promised to get to 2.5% by April 2022.
of next year.
And the idea being obviously that it ratchets up to hit that longer term target in the years between next year in the middle of the next decade.
And you're talking about big numbers here.
You're talking about tens of billions.
and defence spending as a proportion of the economy getting back in the direction of kind of shares of the economy than it was quite a long time ago.
And in the post-Cold War era, people have talked about a peace dividend, about taxpayers' money being able to be spent on other stuff because not as much needed to be spent, so was the calculation on defence, and so money could be spent on the health service or on schools or whatever any government chose to, or a lower tax burden, for instance.
And here this government confronts a high tax burden for all the reasons we've kicked around on newscast by historic proportions on average.
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