Aircraft carrier flies in the face of reason

Sir,

The new UK aircraft carrier that is being boasted of has cost, at £3.2 billion, four times as much as it cost to build Glasgow’s new hospital and three times as much as the new Queensferry crossing of the Forth.

Aircraft carriers by their nature provide no defence for the country and are only utilised to carry planes nearer to some other area to be threatened or attacked.

This and the other one we apparently are building at the same cost represents an obscene amount of money spent in the UK.

It is trotting along behind the US, at its behest, with aircraft dependent on America. The only possible use is in the pursuit of US bullying and warmongering around the world. And they make very big targets as well.

In Scotland we are expected to applaud this obscene waste of money on the grounds that it has provided jobs.

But we could have built enough homes to completely solve our housing problem while providing many more jobs with that money.

Scotland could have built a Scottish naval presence to patrol its waters in the same way as Norway does with 40 naval defence vessels in its waters, all built in Norwegian yards. There is no way any sensible small country would even countenance this sort of imperial imbecility and the sooner we are out of bonkers UK the better. Dave McEwan Hill, 1 Tom Nan Ragh, Dalinlongart, Sandbank.