Trident

The Labour Movement was founded to conserve such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework. All of these were and are corroded to nought by free market capitalism, both in itself, and because it drives despairing millions into equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism.

Marx himself saw Britain, with Germany, as one of the two countries most likely to have a revolution such as he predicted and advocated; it was thanks to Labour that no such disaster ever befell this country, as the sectarian Left's hatred of Labour demonstrates. We are proud to be the objects of such hatred: they hate us because they hate the Welfare State, and the strong statutory and other protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. In a word, they hate Socialism.

However, in recent years, much of Labour's central apparatus has been hijacked by people with sectarian Left backgrounds, who have only changed their Marxism's ending so that the bourgeoisie (and thus the most bourgeois of countries, which is not Britain) wins. These people remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism; Leninist in their vanguard elitism, in their "democratic centralism", and in their use of various religious and other interests as "Useful Idiots"; Trotskyist in their entryism, and in their belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also Stalinist in their desire to create the dictatorship of the victorious class in a superstate, from which to export it (including by force of arms) while vanguard elites around the world owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries.

Contrary to their origins, and to the wishes of almost all of their members and supporters, all three parties have largely been turned, by means of such neo-Trotskyist entryism, into vanguard elites of this Marxist-Leninist (specifically bourgeois-triumphalist) kind. Thus has been largely overturned Labour's spectacular achievement in preventing a Marxist takeover of Britain.

That overturning, and thus the new Marxist hegemony itself, would become complete if another nuclear weapons programme were to be commissioned in succession to Trident. Trident was at least useless only in its own ostensibly defensive terms, whereas any new programme would be useless in any terms whatever, in addition to the fact that nuclear weapons (like radiological, chemical and biological weapons) are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely-knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries while actually governing no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?

Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons, in addition to offending against Islamic (and much other) theological opinion, serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to "play with the big boys", thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time for Britain to grow up.

Britain's permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.

Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are these therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7th July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11th September 2001 were against a country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The only "nuclear power" in the Middle East is Israel; is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East?

A new nuclear weapons programme could only be commissioned on grounds purely ideological in the most irrational and doctrinaire sense of the word, and the ideology in question would be an utterly uncritical Marxism. For a Labour Government to do such a thing would be the Labour Movement's greatest ever failure, and the greatest threat to everything for which it has ever fought with phenomenal success of benefit to the entire world.

Nor would any such programme represent or effect national pride or independence, but rather the wholesale subjugation of Britain's defence capability to a foreign power (however friendly) precisely in the service of that Marxist ideology. That power maintains at least no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, of which almost none have nuclear weapons. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, and towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.

Therefore, the next Labour Leader and Prime Minister must be a person who has specifically, publicly and unambiguously ruled out any such programme, or at least specifically, publicly and unambiguously guaranteed that no such programme will be commissioned without the support of a division of the House of Commons, including a free vote of all Labour MPs, with the majority both of the whole House and of Labour MPs voting in favour. Otherwise, the Labour Party will have ceased to exist, and in its place there will be nothing but a Marxist sect, compelling all of us Labour people to act accordingly.