That’ll come in handy if the balloon goes up and the RN are on the job hunting 100s of submarines all waving a red flag.

buy french Rafales and get the french to buy a CVF from us. They get a major sale of jets and we build them a new carrier for it every one’s a winner.

we order 100 of the jets – cost close to 6 bill – we build them a carrier – 3 bill we get a better fighter and they get to say they got the better deal. Maybe get them to buy AW159 Lynx Wildcat’s in the order something 25-30 of those then we are getting some where.

Integrate ASRAAM, Brimstone, ALARM and such like to a Rafale, a ‘small’ fee to cover R&D costs already incurred by the French/D’assault(The French have already coughed up a fair amount of cash for QE Development) and this figure is probably closer to £85mn/unit if not more, then take into account costs wasted on JCA which we can’t retrieve and suddenly Harrier replacements cost twice as much as Typhoons, going CTOL now means F-35C… Rafale is out of the picture.

Wildcat? We don’t even want it, lord knows what the French are going to do with them… fly them into volcanic ash clouds as an insurance job?

SuperTuc is great fighting drug lords in South America but is out of it’s depth even in Afghan, a token force of some 30 aircraft would be a waste of money.

Money that would be spent on SuperTuc is better spent on more ISR Assets such as Shadow R.1 (RAF’s fancy, Super King air platform) or left where it is.

Unlikely. Given the incoherence of their manifesto (are they really too broke to afford a proofreader?), I doubt they could organise their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone run the country well enough for it to be able to afford the huge rise in defence spending they want.

The biggest hole was in their economic measures, somehow they intended on making no cuts and decreasing tax merging income tax and NI into a single flat rate of 31% with a £10,000 Personal allowance, short of binning the NHS I can’t see how it’s possible! There really cannot be as much trimmable bureaucracy in the public sector as UKIP think… admittedly I did vote for them, Tyneside north is will always be a Labour seat, a vote against Labour is as good as a soiled vote, however I digress.

Liam Fox really was the best on offer out of the lot of them (and definitely the best since at least Rifkind!)… Trident is a good as nailed down, PoW is a cert (probably already was), T3B looks likely…

Just because England has the bulk of the population, why should that be translated into such a dichotomy of power?

The very principle of democracy; rule of the people, every mans opinion is equal. No matter how hard you try you’re not going to convince anyone that the views of 5 million, 3 million or 1.5million are as important as the views of over 50 million. (admittedly that’s the entire population of the individual countries not the electorate, I can’t be bothered to sod about looking for those figures)

Without the Scottish vote Conservatives would have achieved a majority of 19, however they fell 20 short of a majority and left Labour a chance to form a coalition

Def. Sec… I was under the impression we may see a lib Dem in that role (Lord Ashdown was speculated and has been spoke about since Friday morning)

give it 9 months, it’ll fail and we’ll be back at the polls to return a Tory Majority.

Urgh, stop this treasonous talk of dissolution of the union, I wont tell you where in the UK I am *from* but I’m a strong unionist.

as for electoral reform, proportional representation would return 20-21 UKIP MPs which would send me over the moon, you’re going to end up with weak government after weak government, FPTP works better in a 3 party system than a 2 party system

Ok, we’re comparing an aircraft that we don’t know much about and doesn’t actually exist yet to an aircraft that we don’t know much about and doesn’t actually exist yet? On balance I’d rather have an EE Lightning (or Mirage III… I don’t want to start another bloody argument)!