Even military agrees Trident is just a waste

But you won't hear it being debated in the commons

It’s an old fashioned view I know, but I have this quaint notion that before ministers go around splashing hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dosh, they should get a green light from the folks the taxpayers elected to represent them.

It’s evidently not a view shared by the UK defence minister Michael Fallon, who has popped up to say that another £650m has been committed to renewing the Trident submarine programme before anything resembling a debate has been had in the Commons.

And of course there won’t be any Trident debate in that chamber any time soon, since the UK government is expending all its energies on the EU referendum. (You may remember that nice Mr Cameron telling us how distracting referenda were, and we really shouldn’t have any truck with them!)

The spend now, vote later tactic is about as subtle as an onrushing train; keep shoving huge tranches of money at controversial defence projects and then, should the natives get too restless, just say it’s far to expensive to cancel.

It’s all rather reminiscent of our cunning ploy to construct plane free aircraft carriers. Perhaps someone somewhere might have paused to wonder if building carriers at the same time as cancelling that which they carry, was really the most logical path to saving employment in the defence industries.

Just as Mr Fallon’s latest spending spree came to light I happened upon a very revealing TV interview with Major General Patrick Cordingley whom his worst enemy would hardly describe as a pinko pacificist.

The former Gulf War commander made a number of telling points, the first of which was that Trident was not, and never had been an ‘independent” nuclear deterrent, given that not only was its missile system wholly American, but that the US counted our four subs as part of their own fleet for strategic purposes.

It was, said the General, just part of an over-arching defence agreement with the Americans that no British government wished to dismantle.

Plus, he said, no British government could use it without US approval and that any possible use was “driven by American foreign policy.” What a comforting thought with that nice Mr Trump eyeing up the Oval Office.

He then demolished Trident’s credentials as a deterrent pointing out that whatever sabres Putin rattled he wasn’t in the market for having 20 million Russians incinerated and that it was useless against the most pressing problems like ISIS.

He railed against the Trident programme being excluded from the Strategic Defence Review for very obvious reasons, and noted that throwing 100 billions at the wrong weapons would further deplete what he called a “pathetic” navy and “laughable” air force given the cuts they had endured – not to mention an army which, he said, was too shrunken to cope with any serious demands made of it.

The worst part of all of this is that the people taking these decisions, and decimating conventional forces and much else to pay for the upgrade, know all this.

The airwaves are now littered with retired generals, admirals, and air vice marshals explaining why Trident is a wildly expensive irrelevance which, far from making us more secure, is sabotaging our ability to run a modern army, navy and airforce whilst making our country more of a target for militants who see suicide missions as a badge of honour rather than a personal threat.

Biased? You bet I am. But I’m keeping some increasingly powerful military company.