If the Queen wants a boat, she can pay for it....if you want to waste money on a vote, get a public appeal going to raise cash to cover every penny of it from the design to the running costs including the cost of a RN escort vessel....don't p*** my taxes away on it.

If the oldsters don't have their lavish perks trimmed huge numbers of non-oldsters will not be voting Blue again in a hurry....

"So we are having this election so she will be strong enough to make concessions on Freedom of Movement, payments to the EU etc and ignore the protests from hard core Brexiteers."

I agree with your cynical assessment.

That's the whole point of having a GE and getting a big majority....May can then ignore the headbangers demanding Berlin is turned in to rubble the Great British Electorate who will be massively angry when the 'softness of Brexit' becomes apparent along with the cheque we'll be handing over to the EU....

There should be no foreign aid.

The whole article is a list of platitudes....you want GSs...fine but only after the UK is fully funding Technical Education....not as May is planning to do now and splash the cash on a tiny number of schools whilst the rest make do with a fiver each.

Presumably you mean 'have not' had to make further cuts....

Charlotte,

Thanks for taking the time to reply but I'm a NOTA voter....none of the major parties offer me anything but more of the same....

...more green garbage that ramps up power costs that hammer the industry I'm in....

...more moronic green regulations that the rest of the world laugh at yet price UK industry out of the market....

...both parties for all their talk, are determined to continue to waste billions on foreign aid - when the Blues or Reds cut the Int. Aid budget to zero, then maybe I'll vote for 'em...

...both potential parties of government - Reds and Blues - despise the working class otherwise the doors of the UK would have been shut so that no more immigrants could get in...because mass immigration has smashed down wages for any one not towards even the middle of the pile....

...both parties are soft on law 'n' order - life should mean life or we should get the vote on the restoration of the Death Penalty....

...HMG and the Reds are still keen on the Human Rights Act and still mad supporters of the '51 Charter on Refugees - the Australian govt. has withdrawn from that Charter so that it can keep out the scum and economic migrants. When Blue or Reds carry out the same policy, then either will get my vote....

....thanks to the Blues, council homes were sold off and never replaced and thanks to the Reds demand for housing has gone through the roof thanks to mass immigration, then a Blue CotE, being a tool decided to use taxpayers cash to boost the demand for housing whilst keeping the supply of land hugely restricted....

....both major parties seem determined, insanely determined to kowtow to the evil, disgusting totalitarian philosophy that Islam - when will the Blues and Reds realise that Islam isn't a religion, it is a doctrine that is utterly incompatible with liberal democracy....

....even as the rail network creaks, the Blues and Reds have decided to waste billions on HSR instead of actually improving the network for the majority by targeting the spending across the network to really improve things....

....technical education has been binned by the Blues and Reds for decades....totally neglected because education policy was and is written by academics for academics.....if you're not academic in the UK, the education system doesn't want to know....

...neither of the Big Two parties want electoral reform of any kind - so stacks of people are stuck in safe seats where there is no point in voting. The area I live in has returned a Red Mob MP for decades and there are areas of the country that have returned a Blue Mob MP for decades so if you're not a supporter of the incumbent party, there is no point at all in voting....none...it is a futile effort....even if the parties had policies worth voting for.....

....even as voter fraud is rampant because of postal votes, the Blues (supported by the Reds) are dragging their feet about bringing in full voter ID at the polling station and individual voter registration and cutting the availability of postal votes.....in some areas, what's the point of voting when tribal corruption in elections has been imported from the sub-continent and is rampant in the constituency....

.....neither HMG nor the Reds had done much to root out the abuse of children by Pakistani grooming gangs....neither party has talked about deploying the full weight of the state against such people...and remember HMG can order people to go to foreign lands and put their lives on the line or kill via drone strikes....yet Reds and Blues refuse to address such issues in the UK...

...even as the cost of govt. borrowing is to all intents and purposes zero, Reds and Blues remain wedded to the idea of PFI and as a result all parts of the public sector are facing huge bills forced on them by assorted HMGs which wanted PFI to be the 'only game in town'.....

...and you wonder why I choose not to vote Red or Blue and why I point out that joining a party is useless - in fact it is less than useless - because the leaderships of the main parties offer nothing, as I said before, but more of the same...

...once that situation changes, I might vote....

Momentum are keen on the ideological purity that comes with being in opposition....just as some Dark Blues were until Ol' Cast Iron came along and made the Blues electable by, in essence, silencing the Blue Headbangers that the voters had rejected three times in a row.....

The Aircraft Carrier programme was around for decades...years and years.....before Brown and when the project finally got the go ahead....the Blues cheered just as hard as the CVF project meant that kit was going to be supplied from all over the UK....

....the fact that the ships were being going for final assembly at Rosyth was because for decades.....decades...HMG had not put enough work through UK yards and BAES were told to make savings by HMG.....which later led to TOBA (supported by Blues and Reds).

I know you blindly hate Brown and think that everything that happened to do with the carriers was solely down to him but at any moment post '10, a Blue PM could've chosen to have the ships built anywhere....not just in the UK...anywhere in the world....

....the reason the PM didn't is that the cost would have been astronomic as Rosyth was the only yard in the UK capable of actually putting all the blocks together and building the project....in the same way, it was utterly pointless to base the vessels in Scotland as the logistics facilities (including new power lines at dockside, deep water moorings, engineering support etc. was all 'down south').

In a similar vein, you could make nuclear submarines up on the Clyde but HMG chooses not to as it has instructed BAES, over the years, to pour cash into BiF because that is where submarines are to be built as and when HMG wanted them built (which is why BAES has spend about £450m on improving their big shed up at BiF) ready to start building Successor.....or do you want HMG to move that as well?