30.07.2010 - 11:43 a.m.

Politicians are by their nature a cowardly bunch, when your career depends on maintaining the illusion that you are completely dedicated to the proles in your constituency, you ensure that you don't upset anyone even if it means supporting contradictory positions depending on whom you are talking with (it'll be ok as long as the two groups never meet). Once you've created this persona you're free to engage in the power games and back-handers that go with a life in westminster, just remember the age old adage of the politician :

don't get caught

And if you do get caught (seemingly every time by a fake sheik from the tabloids, or a gay rent boy), lie your way out of it if the facts are suitably murky or make a hang-dog apology and then stay out of sight for a few months until it's all blown over, then go back to a lucrative advisory position in the city.

Where possible a politician will use the never ending power of slopus shoulderus to avoid making any decisions at all, which is why decisions are made in cabinet meetings so they have 'collective responsibility' better known as 'sharing the blame'. On the occasions where a departmental minister does make a decision that blows up their face (which is often, as a rule these aren't particularly bright people) they are very quickly hung out to dry so as not to contaminate the rest of the party with their bumbling idiocy.

As we're all in the shitter, financially speaking, due to slimy fuckers over the last ten years eroding legislation designed to prevent the aforementioned financial shittery occurring, just so they could make themselves even more grotesquely wealthy, now we the people have to 'tighten our belts' while you can be damn sure there's no belt tightening in the millionaire suburbs as they exercise their stock options, but it seems it's not just us, the MoD has been given an absolute doozy of a choice regarding their pending budget.

Since the fifties the british government has kept a tidy stockpile of nukes tucked away just in case Red Piotr came steaming over the rhine in a glorious attempt to show how great communism is, and to this day we've an array of fusion bombs sitting in the heads of various missile types distributed around the globe just in case the ghost of Red Piotr starts a' howlin' again.

These bombs are an anachronism, a relic of paranoid fantasies from more dangerous stupid times, and completely useless in the modern theatre of war. Above all, and this is the really important bit, nukes are a political weapon, they are wielded by politicians in stupid games of brinkmanship, they are a symbol of military prowess which is used by politicians when bargaining (read : battering) with other nations and entirely based on the giant historical radioactive pissing contest that's been going on since WWII.

As these are political weapons, up until now they have been paid for directly by the government from a special pot of money no doubt accrued from unclaimed child benefits or underspent budgets for primary schools or some other laughably juxtapositional source. That is until now. Now that the government has bankrupted the country with their piss poor oversight they've shunted the 30 billion cost for maintaining trident onto the military

And here's the rub, the greater military doesn't need nukes, it especially doesn't want trident which is so over the top as to be effectively useless, we can't even deport jordanian terrorists from this country back to Jordan as their 'human rights might be contravened', as they're going to be detained and probably tortured for being terrorists, so how are we going to drop a thirty megatonne weapon on a country ? you can guarantee that a fat nuke will deny basic human rights to a shitload more people than a single jordanian terrorist.

And further to that, who the flying fuck is there left for us to drop a nuke on ? we can't bomb the following 'traditional enemies' for the following reasons :

Russia - durr, that's where we get our oil and gas from
Any other former soviet bloc country - piss poor countries with shit economies, the largest casualties would be among goats and chickens
Iran - we're far too chicken, anyway, israel will do the job for us
Best korea - not our fight, Cowardly Imperialist Dog korea in concert with the US and japan will do the job for us
Some shithole african country - see the goats and chickens argument above
Afghanistan - the job's hard enough for the UN without irradiating the ground as well, besides, nukes don't work well in mountains

There you have it, those hairy, smelly hippies back in the seventies were protesting trident on ideological grounds when we were in the middle of an arms race with russia and the doomsday clock was set at two minutes to midnight, now there's just nowhere left to use trident, it's just not practical any more and it's the right time to scrap it based on solid pragmatic reasoning.

Scrapping it would create a massive tidal wave of sloppy free cash to break over the MoD, shiny new aircraft carriers are only two billion each, for a fraction of the 30 billion the airforce could have (literally) hundreds of shiny new jets, the army could massively expand the Apache programme, upgrade Challenger again and still have enough left over for every soldier to receive an armoured jet pack and a gold plated handjob.

Obviously reason has no place in this argument, the government will put the cost onto the MoD but they won't let them cancel it in case it gives the signal that we're weak and flaccid militarily speaking, and just inviting the US to invade us under cover of their retained and still turgid nuclear umbrella. The fact that our armed forces would be the healthiest they've ever been probably doesn't enter into their minds, i mean how can we (the �royal we� meaning small minded men in expensive suits) bluster about at the G20 and UN summits when we've not got trident they will ask,

"but we've still got cruise missiles and a few tactical backpack nukes and even a couple of laser guided seeker heads, any of these would be far more suited to the modern asymmetric battlefield"

"Ah but it's not trident is it ?"

"well no, but that's the point isn't it, without trident we would have so many conventional forces trident would be redundant anyway"

"How can i look the president of south africa in the eye over canapes when he knows we can't even destroy every city in his country from one submarine"

"well is that ever likely to happen ?"

"That's not the point and you're avoiding my question"

"your question is absurd and devoid of reason"

"And what about when the premier of china mocks us for abandoning ICBM's while he can still char every square centimetre of the british isles from his whore palace in beijing"

"why would china want to do that ?"

"Well i really don't know, you're the chief of staff (combined forces), you tell me"

[facepalm]

I sometimes wonder if we'd be better off under a beneficent military junta, the one thing you could guarantee from the british military is rationale and sensible decisions based on the resources available, they wouldn't be spending all their energy bolstering their own political career and pandering to wealthy donors. Obviously it doesn't work like this in central america, but that's because the people in the military uniforms at the very top of the pile there are politicians in disguise and not soldiers.

Politicians are sociopathically unable to make the 'hard decisions' required in case someone calls them a cunt for it, and you're bound to upset someone at some point because you can't please all the people all the time, so make sure you please your obscenely wealthy mates first and then fuck off the commoners with some half hearted gesture when they start moaning. Further to this you know the military would run the country for the benefit of the country because they defer to the Crown and the Queen's not going let anyone fuck it up, no doubt she'd be happy to be a real monarch again, presiding over her country and not sidelined by a bunch of greasy suit wearing self-congratulating knee-jerk thieving wankers.

I can't see a downside to this, they certainly couldn�t do any worse.