With Scotland’s two largest parties now united in their opposition to renewing the fleet, the argument has particular resonance here in our backyard where it’s based.

And it’s been fired up afresh by the fact that the Scottish boss of Unite has taken a different tack from his UK counterpart and thrown his weight behind those opposing renewal. That matters, because locally the focus tends not to be about the morality of continuing to upgrade a weapons system geared to incinerating millions of civilian strangers – itself illegal under international law – but about the practicalities of the job market on the Clyde.

So perhaps it’s time to take a slighter wider look at this business of Trident’s impact on employment. This last week, as new estimates of the cost spiralled to £167 billion – yes that is a B – the Tory chair of a Conservative select committee publicly questioned how these sums could be justified.

Because renewing Trident also costs jobs. As the price tag for this strategically irrelevant, morally reprehensible system continues its journey through the roof, thousands of servicemen and women are thrown on the scrap heap. Those still serving complain of dated inefficient equipment.

Some Scottish air force bases and all the civilian jobs dependent on them are closed. We are building two aircraft carriers which have no modern planes to take off from them. We spent hundreds of millions on new aircraft and then broke them up to help fill a hole in the MOD books.

Away from military defence, police forces have their budgets and numbers cut, hospitals pay fortunes to agencies to make up the shortfall in trained nurses, local schools lose funding and teachers, and, if you want to get scared about local jobs, take a quick gander at the shopping list of cuts from which we’re invited to make our choices on the council’s consultation website.

The money thrown at Trident, is money taken from every aspect of our lives.

Tony Blair rather gave the game away in his memoir when he admitted not being persuaded of Trident’s strategic use any more, merely that it was Britain’s ticket to the top table at the UN. That itself is a whole other chunk of self delusion.

Britain is not some grand imperial power strutting its stuff on the world stage. It is a middle ranking European nation which could save its citizens much misery if it stopped throwing billions at weapons of mass destruction in order to take vital small sums from working families.

People campaigning for keeping Trident mock the plans to turn Faslane and Coulport into bases for conventional defence jobs whilst investing some of the vast savings from non renewal into a diversification programme to use and secure the many valuable skills on offer. Yet I hear none of these mocking voices making a coherent case for where Trident could usefully feature in modern conflicts.

Would it stop cyber terrorism? Prevent sabotage on planes? Deter suicide bombers? Stop the civil war in Syria? Ah but you never know what new threats might emerge, they intone. Maybe. But we certainly know all about the ones we have right now!

Interestingly the Americans, without whose missiles and know how our ‘independent’ deterrent could not be deployed, have publicly questioned the UK defence priorities. They have voiced concern that in throwing vast sums into one egg basket, the UK has lost the capacity to summon sufficient numbers to contribute to the rapid reaction forces the UN and others so often and so desperately need.

This month we ‘celebrate’ the first anniversary of Helensburgh’s food bank. What a travesty in a supposedly modern democracy that people have to rely on charitable donations to put food on their tables. And how sad that some people still think the humanitarian way forward is to plough eye watering sums into deadly missiles.