Slashing public services while boasting of military spending
Prime Minister David Cameron boasts that Britain has the fourth biggest military in the world, at the same time as he is doubling students' tuition fees, decimating housing benefit for the poor and cutting billions from allowances for the disabled.
Prime Minister David Cameron launched into an extraordinary imperialist rant this evening, boasting that Britain is a great world power with an expensive army.
He told a glittering banquet for City fat cats: "Britain remains a great economic power."
Insulting millions of people facing harsh cuts and unemployment, he went on: "The hard power of our military continues to be backed by the fourth largest military budget in the world."
Britain's armed forces "are respected around the world as among the most effective and professional in the business," he declared in a speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet.
"In terms of our role in the world, the truth is that many other countries would envy the cards we hold."
Gung-ho Mr Cameron praised "the buccaneering spirit of our expatriate community abroad" and "our centuries-long engagement with all parts of the world."
He blithely ignored the huge financial failures of recent years and titillated his wealthy audience by proclaiming with a straight face: "Show me a city in the world with stronger credentials than the City of London."
He enthused: "What I have seen in my first six months as Prime Minister is a Britain at the centre of all the big discussions. Producing the ideas. Consulted for our experience and respected for the skills we bring and our capacity to find solutions.
Peace campaigners reacted to the Prime Minister's rant by urging a big turnout for this Saturday's demonstration in London demanding that British troops get out of Afghanistan.
Stop the War convenor Lindsey German complained: "This Tory Prime Minister goes around boasting that we have got the fourth-biggest army in the world.
"Yet students are being forced to pay at least double the amount in tuition fees, tenants face cuts in housing benefit and people are told they must work longer before they retire."
Ms German accused him of "pretending that the British empire still exists."
She added: "Cameron is from one of the richest families in the country, he is Oxford and Eton educated, and he supports the whole idea of Britain as an imperial power."
CND general secretary Kate Hudson condemned Britain's wasteful spending on arms, which meant other countries were overhauling Britain economically.
The cost of recent wars had reached £20 billion and growing, with billions more still being poured into the Afghan war, she protested. "This isn't hard-headed, but wrong-headed."
Ms Hudson pledged: "As Cameron and other Nato leaders meet this weekend, we'll be marching in our thousands in London."
http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2160/27/
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