Westminster’s nineteenth nose-job

The cost of the Trident replacement have reportedly soared to an eye watering £167 billion, a figure wildly in excess of the excessive amount we were told it was going to cost in the first place. Britain needs Trident like Caligula needs a horse, like Norma Desmond needs a close up, or like the Scottish media needs an SNP bad story. Britain needs Trident far more than a low paid worker with kids needs tax credits, and far more than a disabled person needs dignity. We’ve got to get our national priorities right you know. Our austerity needs to be kept safe from long range missiles that North Korea doesn’t have.

£167 billion is an awful lot of money. Even Bill Gates would notice that amount going out of his bank account. It would fund the entire NHS across the whole UK for almost three years. It would purchase 198 new hospitals the size of the new Southern General Death Star. It would pay for enough Curly Wurlies to stretch half way to Mars, or to the Moon and back 163 times – and that’s without considering the savings you’d make with the wholesale price.

We wouldn’t need a space programme, we could just construct an enormous tower out of chocolate covered toffee bars and the job would be done. Best of all, no one would die of radiation sickness, just obesity. And we’d still have enough left over to pay Bruce Willis and a crack team of mavericks and misfits with unresolved daddy issues to redirect the orbit of an asteroid so it was on a collision course with the Kremlin, an option which would conveniently avoid the need to base nuclear missiles on the Clyde. All these things, even the Curly Wurly space defence programme, are infinitely more sensible than Trident.

Blowing up hundreds of thousands of innocent people is what Trident is for, that and for condemning hundreds of thousands of others to slow lingering and painful deaths from radiation sickness and disease. It’s a weapon of genocide. It’s not the likes of Putin or Kim Jong-il that it’s directed against, they’ll be safe underground in the deepest of bunkers with enough Curly Wurlies to last for decades. The ones who will die will be punters like you and me.

Tory MP Crispin Blunt – although when you’ve got an MP called Crispin it’s probably superfluous to tell you he’s a Tory – said that £167 billion was too high a cost to be rational or sensible. Presumably in the mental universe of Tory MPs there’s a dearth of Curly Wurlies but there’s clearly a price at which it is rational and sensible to blow up the planet and reduce the straggling survivors of humanity to a Mad Max dystopian future. We don’t need Trident for that, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith are doing a perfectly good job of dismantling civilisation as it is.

Despite the fact that 57 out of Scotland’s 59 MPs are opposed to Trident, and this most certainly isn’t an English only issue, the people of Scotland are going to get the Trident renewal imposed upon us. We’ll be outvoted by Tories, and by Labour and Lib Dems who are indistinguishable from Tories when it comes to the aggrandisement of the British state. There’s no price too high for the British state’s pretensions to great power status. Trident renewal is like installing a jet engine on a Lada and entering it in a Formula One race. Only there’s no steering wheel – because that remains with the Pentagon. Even though the MoD wants us to believe that Trident is a completely independent UK nuclear weapon, the Americans keep control of the targetting system. Trident isn’t even the UK’s missile, it’s a branch office of the USA’s – and one that British politicians eagerly sell us into penury to pay for. We’d be better off with the souped up Lada.

Trident serves no meaningful defensive purpose. It has a political purpose, and that purpose is to allow UK politicians to make like they’re important on the world stage. The UK pays through the nose for Trident to indulge the Great Power fantasies of the British establishment but for the British establishment Trident renewal is like Michael Jackson’s nineteenth nose job. The British establishment looks at the man in the mirror and sees a world class performer at the top of his game, everyone else sees a wasted and deluded has been with a dodgy record on child protection who is trading on past glories. Punching above our weight means punching ourselves on a false nose.

Despite the election of Jeremy Corbyn – whose anti-nuke credentials are impeccable – as leader, the UK Labour party still managed to sneak a commitment to the renewal of Trident through their party conference. Labour in Scotland may or may not decide to adopt a policy opposing renewal, although even if they do Scotland will still get weapons of mass destruction imposed on the Clyde. The truth is that we live in a Unionist state whose politicians are so out of touch with ordinary people that we had to hope that a bunch of unelected has beens, bishops, barons and bungers would slap them down on the issue of tax credits. But all that happened was just a slap on the wrists, thanks to Labour.

Labour peers abstained on a Lib Dem motion which would have killed the cuts. The tax credit cuts live on thanks to Labour. The vote in the Lords introduces a three year delay in imposing them on those who already receive them. New claimants will experience the cuts immediately. This is the kind of protection that Labour offer to the hard working striving families that they eulogised before the election. Even Michael Jackson’s nose was more authentic than Labour’s pretensions to defend the working classes.

If the Tories and Labour are so remote from everyday life that they don’t care about making the low paid strivers and hard working families pay for tax cuts for big businesses, they’re not going to care about imposing the Union’s fetish toys on Scotland. There’s only one way we can defend ourselves from Trident, only one way we have a chance of ensuring that the poor don’t pay for the sins of the rich. That way doesn’t run through the Westminster parliament.

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