They're madmen. And we, the morons, put them there.

There is no argument that spending cuts need to be made, in order to get the national deficit under some measure of control. But the scale of these cuts is frankly horrifying - and reading between the lines, even hardened politicians on all sides of the current government are shocked at the levels of cuts that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is demanding.

And now, as expected, he's hit the defence sector. And in a moment of complete insanity, he's killing off any chance we have at keeping our ability to project power, by scrapping HMS Ark Royal, and removing the fixed-wing assets of the Fleet Air Arm, and the V/STOL capability of the RAF, by scrapping all the harrier Jump Jets currently in British service.

BBC News link.

To follow up on the last line of that article: it's not just pathetic, it's tragic.

Successive governments have wielded bigger and bigger axes at the military budget, and the result is mission creep, overstretch, combat stress in troops in record numbers due to appalling under-manning, and a military that's close to being the poorest funded in the developed world per head of the nation.

And we, the idiot public, put the politicians there. What does that say about us, then?