Later this morning the Queen will launch a vessel named after herself at the Rosyth naval dockyards. Earlier, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, appeared on the BBC News channel dripping in gold braid and medals to revel in the delivery of his shiny new toy, or at least the hull of it.

(Rather crassly Sir George claimed that it was being given the name of not just the current monarch but “both our Queen Elizabeths”, even though Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elizabeth and the ship itself tactfully avoids adding a “II” on the end.)

In what was an all-round virtuoso display of foot-shooting, the esteemed Admiral was also keen to point out just how few jobs would be supported by HMS Big Grey Floating Car Park – which won’t actually carry any fighter jets until 2020 – noting that “this ship only has 600 people aboard… that is a fraction of previous vessels of this size”.

And that got us to thinking.

The cost of the carrier so far has been approximately £3.1bn. It’s not known what will happen to the workforce at Rosyth when the work is finished, but it seems unlikely that the 800 jobs at the dockyard dependent on military contracts will all be retained.

(The ship’s home base will be Portsmouth and any maintenance carried out at Rosyth in future would require only a fraction of those, with the Fife base already having been downgraded last year and rumours persisting that planning permission has already been granted to demolish some of its facilities and rebuild them as industrial units.)

Nevertheless, let’s generously assume that half could be saved. Added to the 600 crew onboard that gives us a neat total of 1000 jobs. Which means that each and every job supported by the carrier has cost the nation £3.1 million.

That’s enough to pay someone the average UK wage for just under 117 years.

The day’s other big political news of relevance to Scotland is the UK government’s pledge (announced at a poorly-attended rally in Perth yesterday and conditional on a No vote) to spend £500m on infrastructure projects in Glasgow.

It’s claimed that the sum – which is roughly twice Scotland’s share of the cost of HMS Queen Elizabeth – will generate 28,000 jobs. That’s a bargain at just £17,857 per job, or roughly 0.6% of the cost of each one supported by the aircraftless carrier.

However, the headline £500m figure which appears in all of today’s newspapers is somewhat misleading, as the money is to be spread over 20 years (and in any event subject to a “review” after five years), and nobody appears to have identified where this substantial new cash injection is coming from.

Or at least, not explicitly. Figures released this April suggested that the current UK government’s planned cuts to the welfare budget (which Labour has promised to slash even further if elected in 2015), will cost Glasgow approximately £270 million a year – or roughly ten times the annual spending pledged by David Cameron yesterday.

So let’s just recap:

Cost of one job on HMS Queen Elizabeth: £3.1 million

Cost of one job in Glasgow from infrastructure spending: £17,857

Number of jobs that could be created for the cost of one job on HMS QE: 174

Money being taken out of Glasgow per year: £270m

Money being put back in per year: £25m

Net loss to Glasgow: £245m

Naturally, the No campaign is aglow with this avalanche of feelgood stories.

But what seems to have actually happened is that the Westminster government has just announced plans to rob Glasgow of £270 million a year (plus another £1.4bn from the rest of Scotland) and give less than 10% of it back while expecting everyone to be grateful, and meanwhile wasting vast sums on creating a small handful of the world’s most expensive jobs when spending the money on something other than pointless grandstanding with military hardware would produce close to 200 times as many.

(The carrier, even in half a decade’s time when it may or may not actually have some military capability other than as a gigantic battering ram, serves no practical purpose in terms of the nation’s defence. It exists, as Admiral Zambellas noted, solely to project the UK’s force elsewhere in the world, ie meddle in the affairs of other countries where we have no legitimate business.)

We must admit, we’ve heard more compelling cases for the Union.