Honest Mistake or deliberate misinformation?

This article was posted on the Guardian website two days ago just below halfway down there is an innocuous looking graph duplicated here.

As you can see from the text above the graph it shows that the UK spends more that other European countries on defence.  This however brings us to mistake number one the axis is labeled as billions of pounds.  It would be nice to think that we could fund defence for £2.7 billion.  It looks like the axis should be labeled as a percentage of GDP, but that got me thinking, when was the last time the UK spend 2.7% of GDP on defence.  So find the Secretary Generals annual report online and read through it.  Here is the graphic I believe the Guardian took its information from

So remembering that the Guardian graph is labeled 2014/15 then we are using the while columns above, I would suggest that not only has the UK level being exaggerated, but that the French level may reflect the 2017 numbers and not those from 2014.  The level of exaggeration of the UK expenditure is well over half a percent of GDP which equates to somewhere in the region of £8 billion, which I believe is about the figure most Defence commentators believe is an amount that defence needs to start rectifying the funding issues it has.