Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items

Trident’s £3m jobs are a costly defence of Britain’s fading status

3rd October, By Samuel Rafanell-Williams, Scottish CND

ALICE laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Prime Minister. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

In order to complete our new Dreadnought submarine programme, 65,000 jobs will be required by 2030. This number has been quoted by the Prime Minister in Parliament, so it must be
true. The current cost of the Dreadnought programme is newly estimated at £240 billion by UK CND.

Scottish CND’s estimate in our Reclaim Our Clyde
campaign two years ago was £200bn. So if we divide our more conservative
£200bn by 65,000 jobs, we get just over £3,000,000 per job. Let me spell
out that astonishing sum again: £3 million per job.

CND has some good ideas
on what we might use that money for, such as: 220,000 extra nurses; 3.7m
affordable homes; Tuition fees for 8m students; Install solar panels on
every home. My pick would be ending world hunger. How many enemies would we
have then?

There is little doubt that the world is becoming more dangerous.
A well-used anecdote over the past century is that “generals are always
fighting the last war”. While this may be true of Donald Trump’s illegal
assault on Iran, the Ukraine war is surely quite the opposite.

Ukraine is
changing warfare techniques every few weeks. They are fighting the next
war. The drone technologies they invent are cutting edge for a couple of
months, then become obsolete. The state-of-the art Chieftain Mk 3 tanks we
sent them are unused and irrelevant. Russia’s expensive nuclear bombers
were seriously exposed in the “Operation Spiderweb” drone attack by
Ukraine in June 2025. Who is to say the UK’s own nuclear facilities are not
equally vulnerable? Russia, America and China are major powers. We are not.


The only one of six Astute-class nuclear submarines that is currently
seaworthy is the one launched last month on its sea trials. The rest,
almost new, are docked and awaiting repairs. The former prime minister Tony
Blair notes in his memoirs that deciding to renew the Anglo-American
Trident submarine fleet at Faslane had nothing to do with defence, but was
to consolidate our position as a major power.

This was evidenced this week
by Chancellor John Healey (formerly head of the Ministry of Defence)
announcing that £6bn would be spent on building three floating docks at
Faslane, in order to accommodate more nuclear submarines. This is only part
of the £15bn set aside for further developments at Faslane as part of
Project Royal Oak.

For context, £6bn is five times what the Scottish
Government spends annually on housing. To put it another way, a chronic
housing crisis in Scotland and beyond, among other social harms that could
be remedied with the more than £200bn spent on Trident renewal, is simply a
price the British government is willing to pay to sustain its ability to
destroy the northern hemisphere.

The National 3rd Oct 2026,
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/26604113.tridents-3m-jobs-costly-defence-britains-fading-status/

October 6, 2026 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Putting the boot into a new leader: the monstering of David Shoebridge

Identity politics is at its worst when it reduces the complex, dispersed and often contradictory workings of power to a cast-list of heroes and villains. It turns politics into the story of one man or one woman, oppressor or victim, with the facile implication that change is driven from the top down, by the capture or replacement of symbolic authority rather than by the patient reform of institutions, relationships and material conditions by a process of mutual agreement.

Urban Wronski Writes, 4 Oct, 2026

David Martin Shoebridge has been leader of the Greens for four days. In that time he has choked up on national television. He has been tagged an ecopopulist. He has been accused of prejudice. A Murdoch hack has charged him with being “snobby” to a police officer.

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, tells him to go after One Nation instead. He found it “somewhat concerning” that, “at a time when we see a rise of a far right-wing party, Senator Shoebridge took the opportunity to actually criticise Labor.” Leave his government out of this.

Four days. That’s quick work. It’s also very old work.

Fleet Street called it monstering. In 1914, Kitchener’s propagandists did it with Belgian babies. Our corporate scribes have a four-day-old leader on the bayonet.

It would be easy to answer in kind. Find the villains, name them, shame them, go home. That’s the trap. Naming and shaming is their trade, not ours. The people doing this are seasoned operators and they are shameless. They aren’t confused and they aren’t stumbling. They are building something. The useful question isn’t who they are. It’s how the thing is built.

Start with Wednesday night. Sarah Ferguson had the new leader on 7.30 for eleven minutes. Her first question set the tone. “To get to know you, who is your key philosophical or political inspiration?”

Shoebridge named John Kaye, his mentor in the NSW Parliament, “a person of incredible principle, incredible courage,” dead since 2016. His voice caught.

“Oh, that still bothers you?”

“It still does. It’s a hard start to this interview, Sarah.”

“Why does it still move you in the way it does?”

He told her. She asked whether Kaye had expected him to become leader.

“You’d have to ask John.”

“Can’t.”

“Can’t,” he repeated.

A minute later the weeping man had become a bruiser. He and his deputy, Ferguson said, “came out aggressively” to “play hard ball.” Then: “Is that what voters want? An aggressive attitude towards Labor?”

Too soft to lead. Too hard to trust. Both charges inside three minutes.

The psychologists call it a double bind. The Tudors had a better name. Henry VII’s Lord Chancellor, Cardinal John Morton, had a rule for squeezing taxes out of the merchants of England. If a man lived well, he could plainly afford to pay. If he lived frugally, he must have money put away, so he could afford to pay.

Either way, he paid. Morton’s Fork. Shoebridge was skewered on it before he’d finished his first answer.

The ABC’s write-up knew exactly where the story was. “New Greens leader David Shoebridge gets emotional before launching attack on Labor“. First the tears, then the attack. The soft man, then the angry man. Then the “ecopopulist”. A character arc, pantomime villain included, ready for the promo.

This is the getting-to-know-you interview, and every new leader gets one. Who are you, really? What moves you? Who did you lose? It feels humane. It isn’t neutral. It turns the leader into the story, and once the leader is the story the argument is scenery.

Call it what it is: identity politics.

Identity politics is at its worst when it reduces the complex, dispersed and often contradictory workings of power to a cast-list of heroes and villains. It turns politics into the story of one man or one woman, oppressor or victim, with the facile implication that change is driven from the top down, by the capture or replacement of symbolic authority rather than by the patient reform of institutions, relationships and material conditions by a process of mutual agreement……………………………………………………………. https://urbanwronski.com/2026/10/04/monstering-of-david-shoebridge/

October 6, 2026 Posted by | politics | Leave a comment