Possibly, but have you considered what happens when a cheeky journalist asks Cameron the same question? His options are silence, yes or no.
Silence will see him perceived as running away from the question. If he says yes, he looks like an inhuman cheerleader for Armageddon. If he says no, then he’s wide open for the follow up question:-
What’s the point of spending a hundred billion on Trident if you’ll never use it?
Cameron won’t use any of those options - he will give some non comittal soundbite and move the question on. The point of a deterrent is that you never have to use it - I think everyone who supports trident would say the same. You do however need the “enemy” to beleive that you might use it. That is the cat that Corbyn has just let out of the bag.
It’s meant to be a fricking deterrent, what an utter plank.
What he also doesn’t realise is that if it ever gets to that point, he won’t have the choice, he’ll be ousted for being a weak leader.
I don’t reckon we’ve even got a tridents, and even if we do, I bet we ain’t spent £100 billions on it. I reckon at best, we’ve got some kind of £50 nuke bomb from Asda. We just tell ppl we spend £100 billions on tridents cos like Sarb says, it’s a deterrent.
It’s all gone a bit Yes Minister.
How can it be a deterrent if we all have them and we all know no-one will actually use them because, chances are, we’ll all wipe ourselves out as well?
The biggest threat today, IMO, comes from cyber (lack of) security and that’s where we should spend the money.
Yeah, as long as its red and pointy, who will know. Just hope they took the sticker off
The deterrent angle doesn’t really work for me, mainly because the world is full of countries that don’t have nukes.
They have not been nuked, and I very much doubt that they are even targeted by nukes, whereas I suspect we are.
Why is that, I wonder?
The biggest danger is probably nukes falling into the wrong hands or being developed by unsavoury people.
While we won’t be taking on Moscow at a winner-takes-all game of chicken, there are others who wouldn’t think twice about using them, nor worry about retaliation.
Originally posted by @Rallyboy
The biggest danger is probably nukes falling into the wrong hands or being developed by unsavoury people.
While we won’t be taking on Moscow at a winner-takes-all game of chicken, there are others who wouldn’t think twice about using them, nor worry about retaliation.
Which is a big part of what Corbyn is saying. Most threats come from an entirely different source than missile silos in the former Soviet Union, and with the puny amount of ordnance we have, just in terms of “ammunition”, we’re not capable of winning a nuclear war. We’d maybe get to take a couple of targets down with us, and that is it.
Looks like he managed to aggravate half his shadow cabinet today on the nukes / immigration issues.
i know he is trying to get people to be true to their beliefs and have “healthy” disagreements etc, but at some point they will all have to pull in the same direction otherwise it is going to be chaos. You cannot hope to persuade the public at large if you cannot persuade half your cabinet.
Yeah I thought the same about the shadow cabinet. For now, eIther its a very healthy sign that they all feel very able to criticise him (and criticise they did, the language could have been softer, but it wasnt); or there is already a rift developing which could make things difficult in the weeks ahead.
Being a Corbyn supporter doesn’t make me blind to some of the dangers he faces, nor does it make me view some of this actions as nobler than they actually are. Make no mistake; many of the tenets of this new politics are political survival strategies as much as they are about a genuine will to democratise the party. As others remarked long before the results of the leadership election, he cannot expect to command loyalty by whip with his history of rebellion. So let’s see this for what it is; pretty much the only pragmatic way that Corbyn can command the party; drawing on his grass roots support and deciding things by consensus.
Consensus isn’t some magically achieved point that is decided upon the minute a leader is chosen, although given the patterns we’ve seen in recent decades, you’d be forgiven for believing that was the case. Blair certainly wasn’t able to manufacture universal consent for his ideas, especially the Iraq War, and yet his government had the appearance of one marching in the same direction once the principled had resigned their seats.
For me, the validity of any consensus position comes from the number of people behind it. With both Labour and Conservatives, we’ve had consensus manufactured from a very small group of people, often nothing to do with the needs of the country and everything to do with implementing some perceived idealogical ideal. How long were Osborne and co chomping at the bit to implement their policies?
Given his voting track record and actions over the years he is obviously a maverick, used to doing and saying what he wants and believes. That is not the normal qualities that you would find in a (effective) leader. Do you think he can change sufficiently / moderate enough to be able to bind together enough to the PLP to form an effective opposition.
We’ve already got a much more effective opposition than we did with Miliband. It’s unafraid to oppose, for a start, and rejects the idea that austerity is the way out of a depression. Miliband and co did not manage in five years what Corbyn has achieved in a week, and it’s not because they were any less talented. It was because they were compromised by what received wisdom said they should be, allowing the Tories to frame the debate. That’s bad enough,but Labour even ended up validating their propaganda!
My answer is yes.
From 2011 and shaking out of Wikileaks.
Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent.
Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
Well worth 100bn!
Jeremy Corbyn punts to the nation. Party political broadcast.
“That was a party political broadcast for the Conservative party”.
Originally posted by @Chertsey-Saint
“That was a political broadcast for the Conservative party”.
Yeah, we expect slightly better over here, Cherts. The “Batman” slot is open if you want it. Explaining yourself is also an option.