Moghereini did stress that there will also be much more co-operation in research and development so maybe the EU will be looking to sell newer, better weapons to help with the funding.
However it works, Im sure we can all agree that what the world needs is more weapons and more meddling in the affairs of a greater number of countries.
Well, I did warn our Remaining friends about this. During the 2012 debate between Farage and Clegg, Ol Nick repeatedly called Nigel a fantasist for suggesting it.
The huge question of course, is who this force would hold fealty to.
No remainers here, because well, a single EU wide defence force and budget has been part of the long term vision of the EU for some time. It ultimately, makes a lot of sense unless you are a little englander. Our current Uk defense budget is around 40 bn per year… if we could half that by having a single EU defence force that our contribution was say 20 bn, why we could use that extra 20bn per year on the NHS … an extra 13% would come in handy surely?
We’ll also be cut out of all their defence contracts I suspect. As I understand, this will involve working on new military hardware in a joint cooperation between the EU members. How much of that business will our defence contractors see? Ah well, we can just sell more stuff to nice countries like Saudi Arabia, with their excellent human rights record.
Point being if we were at the heart of the EU with influence, would be to down scale our individual force as we could rely more on pan EU partners in global peace keeping and defence responsibilities and stop bending over backwards to take trumps tiny cock - so scale is what drives down cost.
News just in via the Metro, the Army is 20 years out of date, needs £2bn investment and the best we could hope to do is seize a medium-size market town somewhere in Europe that’s accessible.
So that’s alright then - best get invading before the pan-Europe force gets going eh?