Why do we still send millions to China when we desperately need that money to defend ourselves against countries like... China?

Wherever you look, the UK’s adversaries are on the offensive. Russian aggression shows no sign of abating. China’s jets breach Taiwan’s airspace daily, and with its unprecedented increase in military spending, Beijing’s ambitions evidently stretch further. Iran’s proxies attack British ships while Tehran is on the verge of gaining nuclear weapon capability. The security threats we face are the greatest in a generation.

In geopolitics, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And Britain, hands meekly by its side, is yet to muster a response. Despite a recent increase in spending, our Armed Forces are still reeling from 30 years of cuts and disastrous unwinnable wars that have steadily eroded our conventional capability. We are shockingly under-prepared for this more contested world.

At the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982, the Royal Navy had 43 frigates and 12 destroyers. It now has 13 and six respectively.

Russia regularly deploys spy ships to tamper with our undersea cables, yet neither of the two specialist ships needed to protect them have materialised, despite being announced in 2021.

Our Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era. Worse, there is a £17 billion black hole in the Ministry of Defence’s ten-year equipment plan. By some estimates, if Russia invaded a Nato member, our stockpile of ammunition would last just eight days.

But most scandalously, the foundations of our defence, our Trident nuclear deterrent, has been appallingly neglected. Just two of the four submarines that deliver our continuous at-sea deterrent are functional. They are so stretched that our Vanguard submarines are being sent on longer deployments than ever before.

Our brave submariners now have to spend five months continuously at sea – three months more than in the past. The next generation of Dreadnought submarines set to replace our old and creaking fleet is well behind schedule.

The dangerous and humiliating collapse of our nuclear deterrent is a disaster waiting to happen unless we urgently grip this crisis. A reckoning is inescapable.

The cost of sustaining Trident is cannibalising the rest of the Armed Forces budget. We have no choice but to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves. If Greece and Poland can do it, why can’t we? Many politicians agree. But that’s the straightforward part.

What’s harder is explaining how to fund this increase when money is tight. Those who say one without the other are fundamentally unserious – voters deserve honesty about the hard trade-offs that follow.

Strong defence rests upon a strong economy that can fund military upgrades. We need to relentlessly pursue pro-growth, supply-side reforms: liberalising planning to build more homes, roads and factories, reforming welfare to get people off benefits and back into work, and cutting regulation that stifles entrepreneurs and small firms.

And instead of shovelling more money at increasingly bloated public services, we must drive through radical reforms.

But growth doesn’t appear overnight, and we can’t wait until tomorrow to tackle today’s crisis. Either we raise taxes, borrow more or divert spending elsewhere.

We mustn’t add to the national debt or increase taxes when the tax burden is at an unacceptable high. Nor should we divert existing spending on the NHS, policing or pensions.

Instead we should cut the foreign aid budget and redirect that money to defence. While the aid budget does outstanding work alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our ‘development’ spend is incoherent and wasteful. It’s ludicrous that we send hundreds of millions to nuclear powers China, India and Pakistan.

Roughly a third of our aid budget goes on the ballooning costs of supporting asylum-seekers in the UK. If we ended the abuse of the system by economic migrants and closed the farcical asylum hotels, billions of pounds could be freed.

Another third goes to multilateral organisations such as the UN and World Bank. Approximately 15 per cent of that aid is spent on managing humanitarian crises, the rest we have little control over.

For our part, only ten per cent of the total spent by the Foreign Office on aid goes specifically and directly to deal with humanitarian emergencies. Other uses include nebulous spending on ‘open societies’ and ‘research and technology’.

Halving the aid budget would free about £7 billion a year and immediately push defence spending above 2.5 per cent of GDP. When growth returns, or a crisis unfolds, we could make carefully targeted increases in aid spending.

In a world of difficult choices, we should view our contribution to global peace and security as primarily through hard power and free trade. After all, the expansion of global commerce has been the biggest alleviator of extreme poverty.

We should also bring back ‘patriot bonds’, which enabled people to invest in their security during the World Wars. We should stop guilting City investors out of putting money into our defence industry through warped so-called environmental, social and governance regulations and, instead, encourage them to support British manufacturing jobs and our military.

We need to continue reforming our defence procurement system to ensure taxpayers’ money goes further, and end the indignity of the MoD begging the Treasury for money every year.

In the words of Churchill, we appear ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift’. If we continue to dodge the difficult decisions, they will only come back as greater crises in the future.