Ten reasons to hate the Tories (5)

Point 5 from Cameron's Blueprint for Britain was this:

"We will honour the Military Covenant we have with our brave troops and make sure they are properly equipped to do their jobs. We will also introduce a free sports and entertainment Tickets for Troops programme."

Adjective alert! Will this only apply to brave troops but not cowardly ones, or will it apply to all troops? And if so, why the adjective?

Of course they should be properly equipped, but for a given military budget, you can either do less and do it well, or engage in all sorts of futile wars (i.e. Afghanistan) and do it badly. The point doesn't appear to address the colossal waste and overspend at the MoD is stupendous, whose total budget divided by the number of men (and women) under arms is about £150,000 each per annum. Given that a front line soldier's wage is barely a tenth of that, one does wonder what happens to the rest.

So there are two key topics which any sensible defence policy ought to address, but which this one clearly doesn't.

As to the second bit, as PubCurmudgeon has already said, "One thing that immediately struck me is how utterly trivial many of those points are. "We will also introduce a free sports and entertainment Tickets for Troops programme." Regardless of the merits of the idea, should that really feature amongst the Top 10 priorities of a major party seeking power?"