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Better uses for £100bn

Britain's US-dependent nuclear arsenal is useless. It offers no protection from any of the threats that face our country.

It's probably too much to hope that Chancellor George Osborne will have read the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's People Not Trident report before putting together his Budget.

His speech today will be used to brag about a "recovery" that is not felt in workers' pockets and claim success for his slash-and-burn attitude to public services.

But as CND points out, a government which uses an alleged lack of funds as an excuse for its war against working people's pay, pensions and conditions - as well as against social security lifelines for the most vulnerable - is still ready to spend astronomical sums on weapons of mass destruction.

Britain's US-dependent nuclear arsenal is useless. It offers no protection from any of the threats that face our country.

Claims that it makes us stand tall in the world are empty boasts. Germany and Japan are not regarded as second-rate countries because they lack nuclear weapons. And South Africa's unilateral decision to disarm in the 1990s enhanced its global prestige rather than undermining it.

Even military chiefs periodically hint they would rather spend the money on other toys. CND's careful research - building on findings from groups such as Compass and Youth Employment UK - show that Trident's £100 billion cost could be used to better purpose than that.

This is money that could solve our housing crisis through paying for 1.5 million new homes.

If used to upgrade and refit existing houses to make them more energy efficient it could lift millions out of fuel poverty.

It could fend off the short-staffing disaster in the NHS by employing 150,000 nurses, dramatically improving its ability to cope with an ever-growing number of patients.

It would cover the tuition fees of four million students, giving the lie to claims that modern university education is too expensive to be publicly funded.

The 7,000 skilled jobs that Trident claims to guarantee could still exist without it. The expertise of these workers will be vital to bringing Britain into the 21st century.

That means creating the sustainable economic infrastructure and the green technologies essential to reduce our dependence on dwindling fossil fuel reserves and to battle climate change. And, as the report suggests, such a programme would create far more such jobs than Trident - possibly as many as two million, all within the same price tag.

As Green MP Caroline Lucas says, CND's case is "compelling." Renewing our stock of these terrible weapons is madness. The Conservative and Labour leaderships must be made to see that.

No democracy

The 2003 shredding of a "lorryload" of files relating to police corruption, with potential relevance to the investigation into the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence a decade before, are a further setback for his family's quest for the truth.

Britain likes to see itself as a free country. But from Orgreave and Hillsborough in the 1980s to the deaths of Jean-Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson in this century it is clear our police force is as much a repressive arm of the state as a body dedicated to protecting the public.

The Met, like South Yorkshire Police, has questions to answer. If we cannot hold the police to account Britain is no democracy at all.

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