A difficult budget for George Osbourne but in many ways his PR machine has done its job in bodyserving some of the more difficult questions around the nation's finances.

Questions such as why is it he doesn't have any money to fund UK police forces but the country can afford to be the world's police man?

Police forces across the country are having budgets slashed. Constabularies like Thames Valley have announce that as much as 800 jobs will go over the next three years, including a so far undisclosed number of front-line officers, all to save £52 million.

Meanwhile UK forces have been in action over Libya for five days now involving patrols by Typhoon and Tornado aircraft and attacks by submarine based cruise missiles.

A jet aircraft costs £35,000 an hour to keep in the air. Flying from bases in England this is a six hour patrol. Assuming four sorties a day that is more than £500,000 in five days without them actually shooting at anything which is when the till really starts to ching. Submarines off the coast of North Africa have been involved in destroying Libyan air defences. High tech weaponry may be precision guided to avoid unnecessary 'collateral damage' in military speak or innocent dead people in everyday language, but this doesn't come cheap. Cruise missiles cost £800,000 each so assuming they have fired four a day that is £20 million.

So the government has, in less than a week, managed to spend enough to keep 500 PCs on the beat for a year on a mission with no strategic purpose. International muscle flexing at a time when the the final demand for gym membership is dropping through the letterbox.

Now this expenditure and more could be justified if there was an end game, if it was designed to achieve a goal. But no one, least of all the government seems to know what this goal is. As government defence minister Nick Harvey said this week when asked how long this mission was likely to take his answer was 'how long is a piece of string.'

Assuming this piece of string is for arguments sake a year long, that would be £1.1 billion or enough to keep 36,000 police officers on the beat for a year.

When it comes to military adventures it would seem David Cameron is no different from his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. For all of them it would appear to be like a drug addiction and like any drug addict they may not be able to afford it, but will always find the money from somewhere to feed their habit no matter who or what else suffers.