The right wants money for defence. It should start with MoD wastefulness – or even the pensioner triple lock | Polly Toynbee

W hat’s it to be, warfare or welfare, social or military spending, guns or butter? Hermann Göring coined that phrase calling for re-armament, “Guns will make us powerful, butter will only make us fat.” In her “ Britain awake ” speech, Margaret Thatcher in 1976 warned that the Soviets “put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns” – though defence spending fell as a proportion of GDP in her time, and faster as the cold war ended. …