Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Compel wrote:
OR it's both...

Dreams of former glory play a significant part as well.

Every Scottish MP, aside from the solitary Tory, voted against renewal. The cracks in the Union are getting a bit too wide to paper over at this stage.

I'm a bit curious, what is the publics opinion on Trident?

Just found this article:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13198976.Poll__25__of_Brits_and_48__of_Scots_think_UK_should_scrap_Trident/

"..Poll: 25% of Brits and 48% of Scots think UK should scrap Trident.."

That's a high level but is it clouded by recent activity?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Compel wrote:
OR it's both...

Dreams of former glory play a significant part as well.

Every Scottish MP, aside from the solitary Tory, voted against renewal. The cracks in the Union are getting a bit too wide to paper over at this stage.

But that's more political manoeuvring than anything else. According the BBC News last night their polls indicate the actual populace are split 50:50 on the issue (and is probably similar to rest of the UK). In this case SNP are potentially not reflective of the population as a whole but it is giving them another angle for them to be a separate nation.

Anyway still think a UN controlled global anti-nuclear system is the way to go. No need for them at all then, but as ever the political discussions are polarised into whether we 'should' or 'should not' rather than looking at all the alternatives.

Whirlwind wrote:

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Compel wrote:
OR it's both...

Dreams of former glory play a significant part as well.

Every Scottish MP, aside from the solitary Tory, voted against renewal. The cracks in the Union are getting a bit too wide to paper over at this stage.

But that's more political manoeuvring than anything else. According the BBC News last night their polls indicate the actual populace are split 50:50 on the issue (and is probably similar to rest of the UK). In this case SNP are potentially not reflective of the population as a whole but it is giving them another angle for them to be a separate nation.

Anyway still think a UN controlled global anti-nuclear system is the way to go. No need for them at all then, but as ever the political discussions are polarised into whether we 'should' or 'should not' rather than looking at all the alternatives.

And I'll trust BBC polls as far as I can throw them (figuratively). The BBC is heavily biased against that particular party, or are we forgetting the falsified articles they created during the indie ref a few years ago?

I am of course also biased against that particular propaganda company too of course (at least they're not as bad as RT though).

Latest YouGov poll has Corbyn 54/36 against Smith, and 58/34 against Eagle (Don't knows excluded)

Labour Civil War in 5...4...3...

Should have pointed out that the poll asked Labour Party members, and not the general public.

New left wing party in 5...4...3...

lol

It would be a right wing party though.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
New left wing party in 5...4...3...

lol

I have zero issue with a left wing party. Wouldn't vote for it, but it would be far better than this centre ground, everybody agreeing with each system we have know. The difference between Blair Labour and the Fake Tories is almost non-existent.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
It would be a right wing party though.

Who would notice? Almost everybody in parliament may as well merge into one gigantic party - they all believe in, and vote for, the same things, anyway...

 Mr. Burning wrote:

Spoiler:

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Compel wrote:
OR it's both...

Dreams of former glory play a significant part as well.

Every Scottish MP, aside from the solitary Tory, voted against renewal. The cracks in the Union are getting a bit too wide to paper over at this stage.

I'm a bit curious, what is the publics opinion on Trident?

Just found this article:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13198976.Poll__25__of_Brits_and_48__of_Scots_think_UK_should_scrap_Trident/

"..Poll: 25% of Brits and 48% of Scots think UK should scrap Trident.."

That's a high level but is it clouded by recent activity?

I think we need a nuclear deterrent because it means you're listened to internationally - check out the old BBC documentary called 'a very British bomb' which details our struggle to attain nuclear capability.

My primary concern is we are moving out of a trident era and into a hypersonic delivery vehicle era - the only fly in the ointment being laser defenses.
Of course, that brings in the pandoras box of weather modification...

edit: or is it 75% of brits and 52% of scots want to keep trident?

The UK doesn't need weather modification. We have the most diverse weather in the world already.

Annnd Angela Eagle has quit the Labour leadership race. Which means It's Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn going head to head lol.

More hilarity ensues!

 angelofvengeance wrote:
Annnd Angela Eagle has quit the Labour leadership race. Which means It's Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn going head to head lol.

More hilarity ensues!

I suppose the intent is to cement the opposition votes into one bloc. I suspect Corbyn will win this regardles sof the various obstacles they've attempted to put in his way.

What happens after that is anyone's guess. Will the Labour MP's go quiet and wait for the electoral defeat in 4 years to try and remove him again? Or will they just obstinately ignore him and set up a parallel shadow cabinet? Or will they break off and go solo or join the lib dems?

Meanwhile, will Corbyn accept being a powerless opposition leader, or accept the helping hand of the radical left and end up a puppet in a transformed Labour party?

I'll be getting a lot of popcorn in over the next few months I suspect.

Having looked over his history, this Owen Smith bloke is an absolute nobody, much like Corbyn. Nothing notable in achievements, experience, or well, anything. I'm disappointed that the party of Clement Attlee has fallen so low. It's a sad day for the left.

Feels like they'll split, with Corbyn running the Labour Party into the ground and the majority of the PLP and any loyalist members joining the Lib Dems or becoming a new Social Democrats party.

Whirlwind wrote:

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Compel wrote:
OR it's both...

Dreams of former glory play a significant part as well.

Every Scottish MP, aside from the solitary Tory, voted against renewal. The cracks in the Union are getting a bit too wide to paper over at this stage.

But that's more political manoeuvring than anything else. According the BBC News last night their polls indicate the actual populace are split 50:50 on the issue (and is probably similar to rest of the UK). In this case SNP are potentially not reflective of the population as a whole but it is giving them another angle for them to be a separate nation.

Anyway still think a UN controlled global anti-nuclear system is the way to go. No need for them at all then, but as ever the political discussions are polarised into whether we 'should' or 'should not' rather than looking at all the alternatives.

If by "political maneuvering" you mean "holding consistently to a principled position", sure. The SNP are anti-nuclear, ideologically - many of the MPs who spoke in that debate are CND members and opposition to Trident renewal was in their manifesto(on which basis they were voted in). I know it's a mostly alien concept to Westminster, but it is actually possible to be a politician without entirely giving up your principles.

Of course it's much easier to hold to a principled position when it isn't going to be tested.

Typed a cynic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
More good news about post-Brexit science projects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36835566

TL/DR: It's all bad so far.

I do wonder about Trident. There's a lot of people that work at Fazlane, or something tangentially related to Fazlane and I imagine a lot of people from the Glasgow-ish area has a friend or a close friend of a friend working on something related to it.

I mean, think of it this way it's a £20bn pound project where the VAST majority of the work, due to its nature is going to come from employees holding a British passport.

 Compel wrote:
I do wonder about Trident. There's a lot of people that work at Fazlane, or something tangentially related to Fazlane and I imagine a lot of people from the Glasgow-ish area has a friend or a close friend of a friend working on something related to it.

I mean, think of it this way it's a £20bn pound project where the VAST majority of the work, due to its nature is going to come from employees holding a British passport.

The other argument is how many more jobs could brits have if that money was put somewhere else.

Building and maintaining nuclear missiles, warheads and submarines requires a variety of high-tech skills. A nation that wants to be competitive in the worlds ought to be sustaining such engineering and science prowess.

If the Scots don't want Trident and the economic benefits and local employment that it brings, then move it to an English port and everyones happy.

Well, besides the Scots who lost their jobs of course, but I suppose theyre not s priority for the SNP?

Something that is puzzling me, why are some Brexit supporters determined to have article 50 enacted now? I've seen demonstrations of people arguing for it to be enacted immediately, but that seems like the most ridiculously destructive thing, apart from a leave vote of course, that the UK could do.
Are they so afraid that their position is so tenuous, and their argument so flawed, that they feel that they must push us into an irreversible sh1t spiral without the least bit of preparation?
Anyone on the forum here who supports an immediate enactment care to explain their reasoning?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If the Scots don't want Trident and the economic benefits and local employment that it brings, then move it to an English port and everyones happy.

Well, besides the Scots who lost their jobs of course, but I suppose theyre not s priority for the SNP?

I read that there is no deep water port in England suitable to do this at this time. At the moment, it's Scotland, or don't bypass the language filter like this. Reds8n

Probably just fear that people will find an excuse to 'weasel ' out of it otherwise. I'm more inclined to go with the idea that precisely when is the best card that May has in her hand.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The UK doesn't need weather modification. We have the most diverse weather in the world already.

Laser defences lose energy through cloud, mist and fog so weather modification would deffo be on the 'laser defenses' discussion agenda given our climate!

(i am thoroghly against weather modification - feth with nature too much and she hits back)


I think Compel is right.
If may is smart she'll see that we have to have a proper plan before we trigger article 50 - the markets dont like randomness and uncertainty so the more predictable and planned the exit is, the happier the markets will be about the whole thing.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

Well, besides the Scots who lost their jobs of course, but I suppose theyre not s priority for the SNP?

Faslane would close in an independent Scotland anyway.

 r_squared wrote:

I read that there is no deep water port in England suitable to do this at this time. At the moment, it's Scotland, or fcuk all.

Apparently there are but they are too close to population centres (Faslane is 40 miles from Glasgow...)

 Mr. Burning wrote:

That's a high level but is it clouded by recent activity?

It has been a fairly hot issue in Scotland for years, to the extent that the majority of Scottish political parties are officially opposed to it, IIRC the sole exception are the Tories.

Polling consistently suggests that the scrapping of trident is the majority view, followed by its replacement with something cheaper and then with renewing it. Link

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Of course it's much easier to hold to a principled position when it isn't going to be tested.

It was tested the day before yesterday.

How?

welshhoppo wrote:
The other argument is how many more jobs could brits have if that money was put somewhere else.

That's a complicated subject when it comes to money moving around. Yes, money spent locally is money injected back into the economy, but economically speaking, it's dead money, it doesn't generate further growth particularly well. All defence spending is. If they spent that money on a dozen other different things, they could stimulate the economy in far more efficient ways. The flip side is a) national defence, b) the maintenance of a specific set of skill sets in the population that could be required for conflict at any point, and c) technological spinoff from military developments.

r_squared wrote:
I read that there is no deep water port in England suitable to do this at this time. At the moment, it's Scotland, or

There's at least two others that I recall which could be modified, and Portsmouth is one of them. In both cases though, it would take a large amount of capital expenditure to make appropriate facilities available, and naturally, the MoD is loathe to undertake something on that basis when a perfectly good facility already exists. And I'm inclined to agree with them there, national defence is a burden shared by all for the good of the nation. It's a collective responsibility, and the Government gets to do things like compulsory purchase in favour of it. The minute you start subjecting things like that to decisions by civilian committee, you're doing it wrong.

Otherwise you end up with no-one wanting to have an airfield nearby because it scares their cat or keeps them awake in their midday nap, and storing munitions out in the sticks where it costs ten times as much to move it about because no-one likes the idea of shells being stored in the depot down the road. If there are genuine safety concerns, it's something to take into account, but if everyone raised the sorts of concerns the SNP have done about Trident, we'd literally have nowhere to put it and have to get rid of it.

The Trident vote. The SNP have been long standing opponents of nuclear weapons and they have voted consistently as such.

How is that not testing a principled position?

Because the SNP have never been in a position where their vote actually would get rid of Trident. They have never been in a position where they could decide to get rid of Trident on their own account (independent Scotland) and lose the jobs. They've certainly never been in a position where they might have to make the decision whether to launch or not (which the UK government does.)

I don't entirely see it a binary thing. The issue with Trident is the nuclear warheads, not the naval base. There's absolutely no reason we'd ever fire a nuclear warhead where it'll make any difference, so why not just replace them with something conventional which will be (a) cheaper (b) usable (so actually result in some threat) and (c) keep all of the jobs?

I mean, we can do plenty damage with regular missiles these days without having to vaporize and irradiate cities. The cold war and notion of MAD is long over.

Whilst Trident is responsible for some jobs, as I understand it the warheads are American anyway, so the money is currently leaving the country.


It is true that SNP don't have enough clout in Westminster to achieve anything other than annoy the Tories, but it just goes on to highlight another major political difference between Scotland and England, which highlights how farcical the union is from a political point of view.

Herzlos wrote:
I don't entirely see it a binary thing. The issue with Trident is the nuclear warheads, not the naval base. There's absolutely no reason we'd ever fire a nuclear warhead where it'll make any difference,

That's a fundamental misunderstanding as to the point of nuclear deterrence, i.e. to deter. The point is to have them, so that you have to no use for them, because the possession guarantees their uselessness. If you don't have them, you're in a point where you might need them.

I can completely agree with people who say, 'We wouldn't need them right now'. I'm inclined to agree with people who say, 'We aren't going to be in a position where they would matter in five years'. I can even see them not being an issue within the next ten years.

The problem is, it takes four years to build a deterrent when the skill set is right there. It takes longer if you the deterrent has been gone for a longer period of time (you have to build appropriate facilities, re-acquire the construction skillsets, bring the technology up to modern standards, and so on). So whilst we might not be in a position where they have any relevance for the next ten years, if we decommissioned them tomorrow, we might well end up in a position in twenty five years where we have no nukes, and we end up staring down a conflict of some sort with someone who does and is a lot less humane.

In that position, we're eight years away from having an effective deterrent. And if that somewhat less humane opponent says, 'Do as we say or London vanishes', what do we do then? The stakes are so high in the nuclear game that we might well not get a chance for Round 2.

That means we effectively have three choices. One, we keep a deterrent. Two, we disarm, and accept the above risk. Three, we disarm, tie ourselves completely to American foreign policy, and accept that we can never take a seriously contrary position to them, as we require their protection.

Personally, I'm in favour of number one. YMMV though.

 Ketara wrote:

That's a fundamental misunderstanding as to the point of nuclear deterrence, i.e. to deter. The point is to have them, so that you have to no use for them, because the possession guarantees their uselessness. If you don't have them, you're in a point where you might need them.

But is it a deterrent if everyone knows we won't use them? It's not as if we have enough to actually scare any foreign states. I'm all for a deterrent that actually deters, but I don't think a nuclear warhead is the tool to do that any more.

In that position, we're eight years away from having an effective deterrent. And if that somewhat less humane opponent says, 'Do as we say or London vanishes', what do we do then? The stakes are so high in the nuclear game that we might well not get a chance for Round 2.

Anyone likely to do that is likely to do so every if we have nukes. Nukes only really hold off the Russians, and we don't have the capability to do them any real damage. I'm also sure that if we're still part of NATO then we've still got all of NATOs nukes as a deterrent (we could potentially chip in towards the upkeep of, say, French nukes). We'd have the same deterrent level if we had conventional missiles aimed at them from somewhere hidden in the sea, with the added bonus that we might even use them.

Our real threats at the moment and for the forseeable future are all from groups that won't be worried about being nuked. We can't nuke a suicide bomber. We can't nuke insurgents. We can't nuke ISIS (because by destroying the local infrastucture we'd only create a new threat).

There's never going to be anyone we can nuke, so why not just concede that and move on?

There's nothing wrong with us keeping up to date on the ability to re-arm with nukes should the world climate every change in a way that would require it (and other than the cold war heating up again, I can't think of any). Plus, anti-missing technology is advancing the point that potentially we couldn't hit anyone with a nuke even if we fired it.

 Ketara wrote:

Personally, I'm in favour of number one. YMMV though.

I'm all for number one as well, incidentally. I just don't agree that the deterrent needs to or should be radioactive.

We can't take a seriously contrary position to the US anyway, aside from being passive.