Violet Club,
I have heard no compelling evidence against a cheaper deterrent - Rust's flight demonstrated (if proof were needed) that Moscow's impenetrable air defences and ABM defences were largely imaginary - and I can conceive of no realistic scenario in which a cheaper deterrent, based on SLCM and ALCM (Storm Shadow based if need be) would not be adequate, and would not be more genuinely AUTONOMOUS and INDEPENDENT. That ought to give all of those who dream of the UK going it alone a really major hard-on, and if we put some of it on ships and subs, the cockers-P merchants will be happy.
Not a Boffin,
I apologise for using a statistic which you don't like. I don't know how else to express the fact that since the end of the Cold War, the RAF's frontline combat strength has fallen to something closer to one third of its former size, while the RN is still more than half its former size.
As to the RN being smaller than the RAF in personnel terms, I should think so too. We're living in the age of air power!
And thus far, HNS has not been the stumbling block that the carrier adherents want to believe, and if it ever is, then the op is probably politically unsustainable anyway!