Dear Orkney News,

I had been thinking about how the present British government is planning to spend so much on armaments, and so little on paying nurses.  And then I received a very timely email from the Campaign Against Arms Trade  https://caat.org.uk/  asking me to contact my local press about this very subject, and giving me the statistics to go with it.  Here it is……

“Over the next 4 years, the UK will spend 8 times more on the military than it will on tackling the climate crisis. With just 7.1% of last year’s global military spending, we could have vaccinated everyone on earth against COVID-19.  We’ve got our priorities all wrong.

In 2020, global military spending rose to nearly $2 trillion, and the UK is the 5th highest spender in the world. At a time when our community has been wracked by COVID-19, thousands have lost their homes, jobs and businesses, the government has been spending money expanding into new areas of warfare such as killer robots, and increasing the UK’s nuclear warheads, which breaks international treaties and fuels a nuclear arms race.

Military spending makes us less safe, and wastes vital resources on outdated notions of military strength. Spending like this makes a mockery of Boris Johnson’s ambition to be a ‘force for good’ in the world.

It’s time we chose healthcare over warfare, to truly defend people and planet.”

What do you make of this situation? And what do you think you might be able to do about it?

Yours sincerely, Bernie Bell, Orkney