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You gotta be ready to down those big flocks of aggressive albatrosses you know.
The status symbolism is quite grand. Anyone with the standing capability to sink a carrier (which is typically part of a combat group/fleet while at sea) must also have assets that can be attacked and lost. The planning and design stage is a medium term project with something like this - even now we are still waiting on the offensive part (the aircraft) to be built and commissioned.
That said I would have thought the sabre rattling days of the UK were over, we have now decided to give up our beach landing vessel capability and replace it with a carrier facility. It enables up to project power and partake in international incidents abroud without putting 'boots on the ground' and risking British lives.
It's good to know we still have the ability to create a navel vessel at home, so much ship building capacity has been moved elsewhere.
We don't have a plane like a Harrier any more so it's a full size carrier, or no carriers at all. Small carriers like we had with the Invincible class aren't an option.
Whether they are needed I'm not sure, but we wouldn't be able to mount an operation like the Falklands without carriers.
These were conceived before things like drones became an issue. Not sure how the next generation of warfare will look but it could be very different.
Lack of bingo fields, old chap!
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4JEoCPXTeMg/hqdefault.jpg
As mentioned above its partly to retain some presence on the world stage and partly for the falklands etc. Although our navy seems small compared to what it was we still have one of the largest and best navies in the world.
If we completely get rid of our military, then we'll start to see a lot more "old fashioned" threats re-appear over our horizon. (For those of us who believe in a horizon.)
Of course it's debatable if we decide to partly get rid of our military, but I'm giving the short answer. To some extent it is a vanity project as you say, but if you're one of the bigger guys in the playground you won't have every scrawny little git picking on you.
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.
Remember too that military reasoning does not get discussed in public. There was fuss in the press about the cost of sending one Vulcan to drop a stick of small bombs across Port Stanley airfield. The Argentines filled the holes within hours ... and then moved all of their fast jets back to the mainland. We were expecting to lose at least one of our carriers to air attack, and the Vulcan sortie reduced that risk significantly.
Aircraft carriers are the key to any war, if you got carriers you can get close enough to bomb them, IF you have planes mind!
In the new world, I wonder if you could do it on a budget with swarms of kamikaze drones? Without a human pilot, getting the plane back intact isn't a such a priority. Could you pack some high explosive into a drone instead of dropping bombs?
That would have limits, and you wouldn't be able to attack another ship 200 miles away at sea like that, but you could probably put reasonable quantities of drones into smaller ships to get some aerial capability.
While I don't object to that in principle, something far more useful should have been built with the same money and jobs.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Apart from the cruise missile example a few people have mentioned, there have been studies into using a swarm of small drones. They probably aren't fast enough to threaten fast jets, and they certainly won't hurt armoured ships, but in battlefield use yes.
(Also some research is going on into using fast autonomous jets for defence, and a small group of these would be good enough to beat human pilots. But that's going off topic as you'd need a carrier to recover these afterwards - too big and expensive to be disposable.)