The Politics Thread

[BWFC_Insane]

Defence has to start at your own borders primarily. One large explosion in a certain place could render large areas of the North of England and Scottish borders the most dangerous place on the planet without a nuclear weapon being fired. Missiles and anti Missile systems alongside drones are the way wars are fought, some air power Is necessary alongside the good old foot soldiers, but large target billion pound carriers with billions needed to protect them? I'm not sure, submarines, not the ballistic ones, carrying cruise Missiles and other things would be far more potent.

Alas there will always be a bill for this, no getting away from that, so it's either shrimp farms in Bangladesh, electric vehicles for the Albanian prison service or new Merc cars for some overseas dictators, some of these places have had billions and billions spent on them over decades with little or no change, I know where my choice would be.

The foreign aid budget is tiny and isn’t going to touch the sides, nor even come close to the sort of defence systems you are talking about. Plus you’ve not discussed the biggest immediate threat which is state sponsored terror attacks and cyberattacks. Russia does not need to engage any military for this and defending ourselves against those two threats is massively expensive but also probably the most important type of defence, if we are going to seriously do it.

The problem is where does the money come from? For stuff that is not likely to have a visible or obvious pay off. And whilst adequately protecting our banking systems, health systems etc from cyber attack is probably one of if not the most important things we could do I don’t see many putting their hands up to show realistically where the cash comes from.

[Hoboh]

Defence has to start at your own borders primarily. One large explosion in a certain place could render large areas of the North of England and Scottish borders the most dangerous place on the planet without a nuclear weapon being fired. Missiles and anti Missile systems alongside drones are the way wars are fought, some air power Is necessary alongside the good old foot soldiers, but large target billion pound carriers with billions needed to protect them? I'm not sure, submarines, not the ballistic ones, carrying cruise Missiles and other things would be far more potent.

Alas there will always be a bill for this, no getting away from that, so it's either shrimp farms in Bangladesh, electric vehicles for the Albanian prison service or new Merc cars for some overseas dictators, some of these places have had billions and billions spent on them over decades with little or no change, I know where my choice would be.

The foreign aid budget is tiny and isn’t going to touch the sides, nor even come close to the sort of defence systems you are talking about. Plus you’ve not discussed the biggest immediate threat which is state sponsored terror attacks and cyberattacks. Russia does not need to engage any military for this and defending ourselves against those two threats is massively expensive but also probably the most important type of defence, if we are going to seriously do it.

The problem is where does the money come from? For stuff that is not likely to have a visible or obvious pay off. And whilst adequately protecting our banking systems, health systems etc from cyber attack is probably one of if not the most important things we could do I don’t see many putting their hands up to show realistically where the cash comes from.

I'd be happy to accept the 13.3 billion tiny amount into my bank account thanks.

Maybe if we stopped letting all and asunder, many of whom we have no idea about into the country, we may be safer?

Good luck with cyber attacks, many things like the NHS have too many fingers in the pie saying they want this and that included and like arms procurement, it never works as intended.

A couple of dozen missiles hitting the UK in strategic areas and having secure banks will hardly protect the population, heck there won't be enough branches around to offer protection in their vaults

[BWFC_Insane]

Defence has to start at your own borders primarily. One large explosion in a certain place could render large areas of the North of England and Scottish borders the most dangerous place on the planet without a nuclear weapon being fired. Missiles and anti Missile systems alongside drones are the way wars are fought, some air power Is necessary alongside the good old foot soldiers, but large target billion pound carriers with billions needed to protect them? I'm not sure, submarines, not the ballistic ones, carrying cruise Missiles and other things would be far more potent.

Alas there will always be a bill for this, no getting away from that, so it's either shrimp farms in Bangladesh, electric vehicles for the Albanian prison service or new Merc cars for some overseas dictators, some of these places have had billions and billions spent on them over decades with little or no change, I know where my choice would be.

The foreign aid budget is tiny and isn’t going to touch the sides, nor even come close to the sort of defence systems you are talking about. Plus you’ve not discussed the biggest immediate threat which is state sponsored terror attacks and cyberattacks. Russia does not need to engage any military for this and defending ourselves against those two threats is massively expensive but also probably the most important type of defence, if we are going to seriously do it.

The problem is where does the money come from? For stuff that is not likely to have a visible or obvious pay off. And whilst adequately protecting our banking systems, health systems etc from cyber attack is probably one of if not the most important things we could do I don’t see many putting their hands up to show realistically where the cash comes from.

I'd be happy to accept the 13.3 billion tiny amount into my bank account thanks.

Maybe if we stopped letting all and asunder, many of whom we have no idea about into the country, we may be safer?

Good luck with cyber attacks, many things like the NHS have too many fingers in the pie saying they want this and that included and like arms procurement, it never works as intended.

A couple of dozen missiles hitting the UK in strategic areas and having secure banks will hardly protect the population, heck there won't be enough branches around to offer protection in their vaults

The defence budget is 60Bn per annum and foreign aid was 13.3Bn but already has been cut by about 5Bn with that going to defence. So it’s chicken feed compared to what you are describing.

How are you paying for it? In reality not in dreamland. I’d suggest your options are broadly going to be higher tax or pension cuts. Which is it?

[Worthy4England]

Defence has to start at your own borders primarily. One large explosion in a certain place could render large areas of the North of England and Scottish borders the most dangerous place on the planet without a nuclear weapon being fired. Missiles and anti Missile systems alongside drones are the way wars are fought, some air power Is necessary alongside the good old foot soldiers, but large target billion pound carriers with billions needed to protect them? I'm not sure, submarines, not the ballistic ones, carrying cruise Missiles and other things would be far more potent.

Alas there will always be a bill for this, no getting away from that, so it's either shrimp farms in Bangladesh, electric vehicles for the Albanian prison service or new Merc cars for some overseas dictators, some of these places have had billions and billions spent on them over decades with little or no change, I know where my choice would be.

I think part of the problem mate, is (and we're both broadly saying the same thing, I think) there has to be a balanced view of how much of each thing we need. When we talk about missile defence systems, the Israeli "iron dome" is actually 5 different techs (at least), all to serve different purposes, the missiles range in price from a pretty reasonable £50k to comfortably over £3m a pop. That starts to mount up pretty quickly and as AITechs become more incorporated and sophisticated, then the countermeasures need to also adapt to be able to provide the same level of cover so drone jamming is a thing etc. etc. It's not quite as simple as just grabbing the biggest firework box in the shop - and if you look at how many drones got through Israel's shield then maybe they're a long way from perfection at the moment. And at the point they're not, who has control of the software operating them.

As more tech becomes computer controlled and with the advancements currently being made in digital battlefield control systems, then securing the control mechanisms becomes increasingly more complex and expensive too. This is not WW2 when we were paying factories "costs" to secure our independence, there's very rich arms manufacturers making a pretty penny. If an enemy were to disable our control systems for missiles and drones, they sorta become dumb bits of very expensive and pretty useless ordnance, then you might be happy we have that £6bn tub o tin punting up and down the Med with some attack capability on it.

Most people can't relate easily to headline "big numbers", I don't say that in any sort of sense that they're dumb, they look at a big number and they can't often conceive how anything could actually get to that very big number, so they ask, not unreasonably "what could we do with £6 billion?" and the answer is probably "pay off 5% of our net debt overdraft charges" - what it's really unlikely to be is "give everyone in the UK an extra £89.

Onto foreign aid for a moment. Let's start with 30% of it roughly doesn't leave the country. It's paying for those refugees. Most of the reason we use Foreign Aid abroad came out of our defence philosophy - whilst they were different pots of money - they were targeted at the same broad objective of helping to discourage terrorism and attacks on UK assets overseas as well as some good old fashioned UK moral high ground. If you look at a business like BP, it has assets it lots of weird and wonderful places, maybe use Angola as an example where it has oil fields - we don't give it away just for shits and giggles generally, we're looking after our investments as best we can. As numerous generals have said down the years, both here and abroad, we can spend it on creating sustainable water supplies or we can spend multiples of that amount going fishing out compromised assets.

[Prufrock]

Worth noting Israel is surrounded by people chucking low level rockets at it constantly. Publicly showing the strength of the Iron Dome is obviously in their interest (and impossible to hide anyway). The sort of anti -ballistic thing we'd need would obviously be secret. Hope it's there but they aren't going to say. Not sure that's defence priority 1 anyway, like.

[Worthy4England]

I doubt anyone hasn't spotted the location of our assets Hobes somewhat mysteriously and a bit cloak and dagger described as "the North of England." Given it's on Google maps. Pretty sure the postcode is on their website so they can prolly type that into their Tomtom.

[BWFC_Insane]

I have spoken with a military expert who laid out in detail how Russia could and likely would cripple us without any military force being involved.

It first involves crippling much of our digital and online infrastructure. Various cyberattacks taking down systems to at least blocking access to them. Banks, hospitals, defence systems, critical infrastructure. Confusion then series of terror attacks in major cities. We might know it’s Russia but not instantly provable then what would response be?

[Hoboh]

I doubt anyone hasn't spotted the location of our assets Hobes somewhat mysteriously and a bit cloak and dagger described as "the North of England." Given it's on Google maps. Pretty sure the postcode is on their website so they can prolly type that into their Tomtom.

actually there is a couple of places but it's probably not wise to put the names out on social media these days without attracting the attention of the thought police, and God forbid you shout at a police dog and get 20 months.

Seriously, look at it this way. If Russia was to go on the offensive through mainland Europe in a conventional war, given what we've seen in Ukraine who let's face it, haven't equipment anything like the Poles, French, Germans, their loss of manpower and equipment would be enormous. Then there is the vulnerability of cross the channel/North sea. The only way is via the air, given their planes ain't anything like they are cracked up to be when coming up against Typhoons and f35's with subs at sea, the only thing we are really vulnerable to are missiles and drones. The UK has a nifty cheap laser system under development to deal with drones but we would need quite a few of those.
Virtually all cities and towns would currently have no protection.
On the subject of the afore mentioned place, I'll give you an idea of how the government view it, I was on site a couple of times after 9/11 and they had installed a couple of SAM sites around it.

BWFCi asks about money, perhaps another Ten billion from the spending of the lunatic Millibands budget wouldn't go amiss, net Zero is useless if war breaks out.

[Worthy4England]

Yeah been a while since I've been on Sella (or one of the other likely targets nudge, nudge). I don't expect Russia to start a "march through Europe", imminently, if ever. But, as I said, you can't just try and "absorb" a consistent barrage for ever.

If you're on about Dragonfire, that's developed by a company that's less than half owned by BAE Systems, about the same by the European Airbus and a quarter by the Italian company Leonardo. Better keep those Europeans sweet, eh? Otherwise spare parts might be a stretch!

[Worthy4England]

Anyhow Hobes. You might be pleased to know I'm now an avid supporter of the US Border Wall. Right round the classless fcukers. With a roof on and no doors or windows. Fcuk me they're shithouses.

[BWFC_Insane]

Anyhow Hobes. You might be pleased to know I'm now an avid supporter of the US Border Wall. Right round the classless fcukers. With a roof on and no doors or windows. Fcuk me they're shithouses.

Can we not move the Russians there first please? Lock the lot in.

[Hoboh]

What happened in the Whitehouse just proved, we have to up our defence, now.

[Hoboh]

"Ocado to cut 500 technology and finance jobs as AI reduces costs"


A warning of the other looming war.

[Worthy4England]

"Ocado to cut 500 technology and finance jobs as AI reduces costs"


A warning of the other looming war.

People need to wake up to the fact that whether you're right of me or I'm left of you. The problem will not come from either of those camps on the ground it'll come from people with the biggest stack of poker chips...

[Hoboh]

"Ocado to cut 500 technology and finance jobs as AI reduces costs"


A warning of the other looming war.

People need to wake up to the fact that whether you're right of me or I'm left of you. The problem will not come from either of those camps on the ground it'll come from people with the biggest stack of poker chips...

It will come from all three I'm afraid.
I worry that Starmer, now, is about is about to put us in a very vulnerable position in a military/financial sense, both his and the previous government as well seem hell bent on getting us involved in Ukraine. The Danes, Fins, Dutch, Poles, Germans, possibly even the French are the only European countries that you could trust, the Mediterranean mob ain't worth a fig. Oh and I don't mean Greece, they have enough on their doorstep.

[BWFC_Insane]

Starmer certainly showing what he’s good at the past few days. Right man and right time for an international crisis.

Good at this stuff. Terrible at the vision and public persuasion stuff. Them’s the breaks.

[Hoboh]

Starmer certainly showing what he’s good at the past few days. Right man and right time for an international crisis.

Good at this stuff. Terrible at the vision and public persuasion stuff. Them’s the breaks.

All the posturing in the world won't help if Trump backs out of NATO, the Norwegian fuel company refusing to re-fuel US forces, on principle, ain't going to help matters.

[BWFC_Insane]

Starmer certainly showing what he’s good at the past few days. Right man and right time for an international crisis.

Good at this stuff. Terrible at the vision and public persuasion stuff. Them’s the breaks.

All the posturing in the world won't help if Trump backs out of NATO, the Norwegian fuel company refusing to re-fuel US forces, on principle, ain't going to help matters.

Well indeed but Starmer isn’t posturing. It’s easy (and correct) to sit there and splurge out that Trump and Vance are the worst human beings going and their supporters either equally as bad or just plain thick. But doing that even though it’s correct isn’t going to change reality.

All that the UK can do here is try and pull together a peace deal and encourage Europeans to help police it with some sort of security guarantee from the US. However hard or unlikely that is there isn’t another option.

[Hoboh]

Starmer certainly showing what he’s good at the past few days. Right man and right time for an international crisis.

Good at this stuff. Terrible at the vision and public persuasion stuff. Them’s the breaks.

All the posturing in the world won't help if Trump backs out of NATO, the Norwegian fuel company refusing to re-fuel US forces, on principle, ain't going to help matters.

Well indeed but Starmer isn’t posturing. It’s easy (and correct) to sit there and splurge out that Trump and Vance are the worst human beings going and their supporters either equally as bad or just plain thick. But doing that even though it’s correct isn’t going to change reality.

All that the UK can do here is try and pull together a peace deal and encourage Europeans to help police it with some sort of security guarantee from the US. However hard or unlikely that is there isn’t another option.

I agree, something needs sorting out but for the life of me I cannot figure out why so much of this mission for peace is landing on our doorstep instead of being instituted by the, well according to some, all powerful EU neighbours of Ukraine who supposedly have so much more to loose.
The collective action or lack of other than words by most of the EU, Poland exempt, has made the prospect of a 'European army' farcical.
The way things stand and has since the end of ww2 is the fact the UK is strategically placed as the US largest aircraft carrier, that always gives us the edge in any transatlantic relationship, but under the current American administration, even that may not be enough if we don't play the right card.

[Worthy4England]

Starmer certainly showing what he’s good at the past few days. Right man and right time for an international crisis.

Good at this stuff. Terrible at the vision and public persuasion stuff. Them’s the breaks.

All the posturing in the world won't help if Trump backs out of NATO, the Norwegian fuel company refusing to re-fuel US forces, on principle, ain't going to help matters.

TBF, I've canned most of my shit that involves subscription from US companies. The only ones I still have is coz they'd already renewed...

Fcuk 'em. Pretty sure we didn't leave Europe to be American.