More Relevant and Much Harder

Diane Abbott writes:

This week Jeremy Corbyn restated his well-known position on nuclear weapons.

Asked if he would ever use the nuclear button, he replied: “No. I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons.” 

Nobody should have been surprised. He has held this position all of his adult life. What would have been absurd would be for him to say anything else.

So Corbyn will have been as taken aback as anyone else by the kerfuffle this caused in some quarters of his shadow cabinet.

His statement was described as unhelpful, although no one explained who it was unhelpful to. Arms dealers, perhaps?

The truth is that the complainers say more about political attitudes during the New Labour era than about defence policy.

On the specific issue of Trident, three senior military officers, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, General Lord Ramsbotham and General Sir Hugh Beach, summed up the case against it in a letter to the Times in 2009.

Among other things they pointed out:

“The force cannot be seen as independent of the United States in any meaningful sense. It relies on the United States for the provision and regular servicing of the D5 missiles.

“While this country has, in theory, freedom of action over giving the order to fire, it is unthinkable that, because of the catastrophic consequences for guilty and innocent alike, these weapons would ever be launched, or seriously threatened, without the backing and support of the United States.”

This shows how utterly pointless the “finger on the button” question is.

And the generals went on:

“Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely, to face, particularly international terrorism; and the more you analyse them the more unusable they appear …

“Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics.” 

The uselessness of Trident has been long understood. So clinging to it as a Labour party commitment is all about presentation and nothing to do with serious defence policy.

Yet renewing Trident will cost £100bn. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has admonished us all that we have to live within our means.

So why spend billions on a cold war weapons system that is effectively useless?

There are more general questions, too, raised by the response to Corbyn setting out his views on Trident. The first is: have colleagues really learned the lessons from the leadership campaign?

One of those lessons is, surely, that people are tired of obfuscation and spin. They want politicians who believe in something and who set out those beliefs honestly.

But there is also an issue about what constitutes leadership.

Critics of Corbyn on Trident seem to think that leadership consists of a willingness to press a button and incinerate millions of people, or even to send thousands of British troops to risk their lives in wars of dubious legality.

I suspect the public is weary of this kind of so-called leadership.

Instead, Corbyn is trying to offer leadership on issues such as putting human rights at the top of our foreign policy agenda, even if it involves challenging allies like Saudi Arabia.

In the world we face in 2015, that kind of leadership is both more relevant and much harder.