Trident and its £20bn future

How does the price of Trident compare to HS2?

I'm really of the opinion that nukes are very much a part of the cold war and have little relevance to tackling the enemies of the UK today. If nothing else, if you get to the point where you are genuinely threatening to use them then most of Western capitalist society will already have collapsed anyway.*

As for what to do instead with the money? I'd feel a lot safer knowing that the intelligence services are getting all the funding they need to discover the genuinely horrendous people who wish us harm and for the military to be given equipment that they can actually use to defend our borders and overseas interests. If it's goodwill that you are after and application of highly trained and effective personnel in a crisis, then I'd sooner see British military taking a more prominent role in disaster relief activities. More International Rescue but with teeth.

To fix the potholes, I'd scrap the HS2 white elephant before too much money has been squandered to stop it.

*We could of course both destroy our capitalist society and get rid of the nukes by voting for Corbyn.

I'm really of the opinion that nukes are very much a part of the cold war and have little relevance to tackling the enemies of the UK today. If nothing else, if you get to the point where you are genuinely threatening to use them then most of Western capitalist society will already have collapsed anyway.*

As for what to do instead with the money? I'd feel a lot safer knowing that the intelligence services are getting all the funding they need to discover the genuinely horrendous people who wish us harm and for the military to be given equipment that they can actually use to defend our borders and overseas interests. If it's goodwill that you are after and application of highly trained and effective personnel in a crisis, then I'd sooner see British military taking a more prominent role in disaster relief activities. More International Rescue but with teeth.

To fix the potholes, I'd scrap the HS2 white elephant before too much money has been squandered to stop it.

*We could of course both destroy our capitalist society and get rid of the nukes by voting for Corbyn.

First, we don't have a choice. The lifetime cost is 120 bn, iirc, not 20 bn. The process of "choosing" is entirely corrupt, cannot be anything else given the sums involved. They invade countries for this kind of amount. You think they'd let this purchase not happen? Post-politics consultant jobs, big "speech fees", donations to favoured charities where relatives are the key staff, this stuff is endless. Read the CV of most of the rich ex-MPs. Surprisingly "lucky" in their business decisions many of them.

At the other end from the carrot end, there's the odd suspicious heart attack, suicide, car crash as well. These things don't get turned down.  It's out of our hands. 

But setting that aside, arguing the topic, just for fun, they don't have nukes in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Norway (v near Russia, those ones) and all the others in Europe bar France. None of them are on the cusp of buying nukes. Most of us would not spend £2000 buying our own household into nuke cover, if they don't in Germany or Italy or Spain, if we actually had a choice, which we don't because it's all corrupt.

Maintaining engineering jobs is the most rational pro argument. But it's not good value as a regeneration strategy. If there were a way to lock in the spend for non-nuke regeneration in the regions currently benefiting from nukes, the debate would be more one-sided. Actually iirc, it's already 70% anti, in the UK public. But we don't have a choice because it is all corrupt, as mentioned above.

To put it into context, £20bn is the same amount as buying 20 million £1,000 bikes, enough to fill the M25 285 times over (or so). So a bunch of missiles which we never actually want to use but could turn the half the planet into a nuclear wasteland. Or alternatively turn the UK overnight into a civilised country, and make the entire population of Holland say goverdomme simultaneously.

This should be the standard by which all public spending decisions should be made. "Thirty grand salary increase for the head of a quango who got the job becase he deleted the pig photos? Sod that. We could put the whole of our kid's class on bikes for that".

It could be argued, given the renewed tension and hostility between Russia and the EU & US, that we're on the brink of, or already in, Cold War II.

I'd scrap it. Nukes were for the cold war. Who are we going to use them against these days? Daesh? Boko Haram? Nope, better things to spend the money on now that the cold war's over.

I'd keep it. Yes, it's expensive, but so is going to war. Having nukes doesn't only mean that nuclear powers don't go to war with us, they also mean that conventional war is far less likely to break out.

It's not the EU that has kept peace in (most of Europe) for the last 70 years, it's nukes.