Reviewing Trident

At 10pm, the House of Commons will vote on an amendment tabled by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, to include Trident in the Strategic Defence Review. There is nothing either strategic or defence-related about Trident, but it will usefully compel the Lib Dems to vote against their own manifesto. How many of them who are not in receipt of Ministerial salaries will do so? Gordon Brown had been ready to give up Trident in order to put together the Rainbow Coalition. But Nick Clegg preferred David Cameron.

I do not believe the SNP for one moment on this. But Plaid Cymru - not a separatist party, a voice of Welsh-speaking areas rather than of the nasty Welsh-speaking oligarchy in English-speaking areas, and a party which had the wit to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan - is a different matter, being, with sections of Labour and the Lib Dems, an embodiment of the strong peace tradition in Wales, and of the rural Radicalism that survived there when it was mostly allowed to die of neglect in England after the First World War.

In the past, comments have been posted here suggesting in all seriousness that because Plaid Cymru’s base was rural, it could not be working-class. How very New Labour, to assume that the only people living in the countryside do not do so during the week, except in August. As the American pioneers could not see the Red Indians, and as the Zionist pioneers could not see the people whom they made into the Palestinians, so the New Labourites of all parties and none cannot see the rural working class, or indeed either the working class or the permanent rural population at all.

Meanwhile, why are the Conservatives not voting to review Trident, or even to scap it? Far from representing national pride or independence, our nuclear weapons programme has only ever represented the wholesale subjugation of Britain’s defence capability to a foreign power. That power maintains no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, almost none of which have nuclear weapons. Like radiological, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear 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 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 the 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? It is mind-boggling to hear people go on about Iran, whose President is in any case many years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and in any case only wants one (if he does) to use against the only Middle Eastern country that already has them. What does any of this have to do with us?

Numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the Fifties and Sixties. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO. Enoch Powell denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle. The rural populist John G Diefenbaker, who opposed official bilingualism in Canada’s English-speaking provinces, and who campaigned for his flag to remain the Canadian Red Ensign with the Union Flag in its corner, also kept JFK’s nukes off Canadian soil.

Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

There could not be bigger and more unwise spending, or a more ineffective example of the “Big State”, than nuclear weapons in general and Trident in particular. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, and towards paying off our national debt, 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. It is what Disraeli would have done.