Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

The government is making cuts that could result in the loss of 600,000 jobs across the public sector. Instead the government could cut Trident, which would save them more than £100 billion. Here are just some of the areas that are being cut:

Education The government is cutting £1 billion from the schools budget, and has cancelled the Building Schools for the Future plan, which translates into more than 700 school improvement projects. There has since been a knock-on effect in other sectors besides education. Architects have had an 11.5% increase in unemployment, for the first time for ten months.

25% cuts have also been made to university funding. This equals about 22,000 jobs and will likely result in lower staff to student ratios and a worsening experience for students. At the same time around 180,000 applicants are likely to be turned away for places at university. There are currently 923,000 16-24 year olds who are already jobless. This will likely increase if university applications are denied in such great numbers.  

Environment The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has announced a £34 million cut to its low-carbon programme, and the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) – the government’s own environmental watchdog – has been scrapped. This is in spite of the SDC introducing green measures that saved Whitehall £60-70m.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is having to slash its £3bn annual budget by at least £750m over four years, while green show homes, Eco towns and energy efficiency initiatives are among the £19.5m in green cuts recently announced. Each decision will mean reductions in future CO2 savings, green jobs and new low carbon product markets – and this is coming from the party that claims to be the greenest ever!

Arts Arts budgets have seen cuts of £61m, including the UK Film Council. This is despite the Government’s arts budget costing tax payers only 17p a week per person (less than half the price of a pint of milk) and representing less than 1% of the NHS budget.

Volunteering £25m has been cut from volunteering schemes. Charities involved in the Youth Community Action programme for under-16s are losing £14m funding for this year, saving the Dept of Education just £7m. The youth volunteering charity V has lost £8m for its vschools scheme, and faces cutting more than 90 jobs.

Connexions Connexions offers advice on careers, education, work and personal issues to people aged 13 to 19, and for young people with disabilities up to age 25. Local authority cuts for youth services could mean thousands of staff at Connexions careers advice services lose their jobs and that further thousands of young people across England could be left without careers and college advice.

Playgrounds The Department for Education will be cutting £65 million from the Playbuilder budget, meaning 1,400 new playgrounds will be cancelled nationally.

The above cuts total £1.9 billion – a fraction of the budget for Trident and its replacement.

Britain is the only country in the European Union that allows military recruitment at the age of 16. Some others allow it at 17, but many of these are phasing it out. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that all public institutions (including the armed forces) have a legal obligation to ensure that “in all actions concerning children (i.e. those aged under 18)…the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”. As the armed forces need to recruit about 20,000 new people every year to replace those who leave, it’s more than likely that recruiters’ primary concern is with reaching recruitment targets, not with young people’s best interests.

The UNCRC has also called on Britain to review the policy of recruiting under-18s and has expressed concern that by recruiting in this age group they might actually be targeting the economically disadvantaged. This goes against the UNCRC recommendation that military recruitment should not target low-income groups. According to a 2009 study, army recruiters visited 40% of mainstream schools in London between September 2008 and April 2009. 51% of these schools were in the most disadvantaged fifth of all mainstream state secondary schools. Recruitment in deprived schools doesn’t only happen in London. In 2006, the army was also 50% more likely to visit schools in the most deprived areas of Wales than to visit those in less deprived areas. Many young people from poorer backgrounds join the army because they don’t feel they have any other opportunities – many see it as a last resort. 

In 2008, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces denied that recruitment goes on in schools and stated that army visits to schools were merely "to offer advice on service careers”. However, this contradicts the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) Youth Policy, which states that visits to schools are a “powerful tool for facilitating recruitment". The army’s Camouflage programme and the RAF’s Altitude programme are both targeted at young people below recruitment age and glamorise war as a way to drive recruitment.

The House of Commons’ Defence Committee in 2004-05 also had concerns about the appropriateness of recruiting people under 18 into the military. It recommended that the MoD examine the potential impact of raising the recruitment age for all three services to 18. The MoD stated in its response to the Defence Committee that once people turn 18 they are more difficult to attract as recruits because they have made ‘other lifestyle choices’ like employment or further education. The MoD also acknowledged that the proportion of ethnic minority recruits is considerably higher amongst people under 18s, and they are concerned that raising the entrance age could adversely impact on the ethnic minority recruiting levels. But however successful the military is in recruiting minorities under the age of 18, not many of them will make it into the upper echelons of the military. Just 2.5 per cent of officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, or equivalent, are from ethnic minorities, with an even smaller proportion achieving that level in the Navy.