Easy Street
Not pointless as HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the new carriers, will be finished by 2014. It was planned she would operate Harriers until the F-35B was available with support contracts to that effect already signed.
All the main parties agreed with the invasion of Iraq so a cross party consensus is not as rare as you suggest once HMG decides to intervene using the armed forces. Same also went for Afghanistan where like Libya but unlike Iraq, we had much clearer UN approval.
If imagery (not just BBC, ITV and Sky but increasingly user generated material from say You-Tube) becomes the main input playing on our moral compass and then on our Foreign and Defence Policy, the benign world imagined by SDSR especially pre 2020 used to justify capability cuts, is unlikely to exist.
