Can Britain afford it?

The UK is in bad financial straits.

That’s not disputed by any political parties, however, they are arguing over how best solve it.

The new coalition government has set out on immediate cuts in public spending, with £6 billion in savings being announced immediately.

Public servants across the board are nervously expecting budget cuts and redundancies, but will the axe fall on areas such as defence and intelligence?

Before the election both Labour and the Conservatives were pledged to spend billions on a like for like replacement to the Trident nuclear missile system which will become obsolete in the 2020s.

(A note here: Nuclear missile systems, and military systems in general, are difficult to buy off the shelf. Planning for replacement tends to start a long way in advance.)

The Liberal Democrats said the costs of a like-for-like replacement was as much as £100bn and said they would review the case for replacement.

Now the Conservatives are in government with the Liberal Democrats; there are many, many areas where it will be interesting to say the least, how the parties will try to cross ideological divides, but Trident will perhaps be more interesting than most.

And defence and security spending in general is already coming under scrutiny, especially in times of economic hardship and spending cuts.

Earlier this week, MPS from Plaid Cymru, the SNP and Caroline Lucas, Britain’s only Green MP tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech calling for a review on the government’s thinking on replacing Trident.

It was easily defeated in a vote in the House of Commons, but it is noticeable that other are looking at spending on national security.

Simon Jenkins is a columnist for the Guardian, but generally writes from a perspective on the right. In this article he argues for huge cuts in the defence budget.

Indeed he argues that Britain has no need for its armed forces at all. Which is an interesting position for a journalist of the right.

Diane Abbott, a candidate for the Labour leadership, has signaled that she is against replacing Britain’s nuclear capability at all and made the point that New Labour’s staunch support for its replacement was a very expensive way of keeping a hostile press off its case on defence.

It will be very interesting to see how thinking changes as cuts start to bite in hospitals and schools if the government commits to spending billions on missiles, it hopes, by definition, never to use.