WHAT is the most expensive seat in the world?

I would suggest it is the seat the United Kingdom occupies permanently within the elite inner sanctum of the United Nations Security Council. Along with the United States, Russia, France and China, we got it first as one of the victorious nations in the Second World War, and still as a major imperial power in the world. Although the UK no longer has an empire and is fast slipping down the global ranking of industrial and economic nations, we grimly still hang on to that prestigious seat at the top table. Today Britain still qualifies only because, like the other four members, we have a large arsenal of nuclear weapons.

That is why the three main UK political parties are determined to retain Trident, even when it sucks several billion pounds a year out of our shrinking national budget. It is all a matter of international prestige and influence. It has little or nothing to do with defending ourselves from a nuclear attack from Russia more than 20 years after the Cold War ended, or being a deterrent to some mad dictator hell-bent on self-destruction.

So the British public has to put up with austerity, cuts in public expenditure, social benefits and the NHS, and reductions to our conventional armed forces, while the Government continues to ring-fence the huge cost of nuclear weapons and is seriously contemplating replacing Trident for another 50 years or so. This is surely madness, and must be resisted.

We in Scotland have a further strong reason to oppose this insane policy - the fact that the submarines and the huge store of armed nuclear warheads are based on the Clyde, only 20 miles away from our biggest urban conurbation and, in the event of an attack on the Faslane base or even a disastrous accident, within killing range of half the Scottish population. And let's not forget the secret convoys of military vehicles which travel the roads of Lanarkshire, Stirlingshire and Dunbartonshire at dead of night several times a year carrying newly-armed warheads from the south of England.

One of the immediate benefits of independence would be the swift removal of all the weapons of mass destruction.

Iain AD Mann,

7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.