Defence, Diversification

Apparently, the Secretary of State for Defence is one Ben Wallace. He has written to the United States Congress, begging it to fund the new warhead for Britain's "independent" nuclear "deterrent".

This degrading farce is taking place in the context of an increase of over a billion pounds in the last year, unconnected to Covid-19, in the cost of replacing Trident. Four major nuclear projects are rated amber or worse, meaning that they have "significant issues". The Ministry of Defence has rebaselined two of them, indicating significantly increased costs and significantly lengthened timelines.

The "Trident Dividend" idea is doing the rounds again. But while of course the categories are not entirely separate, the case against Trident is not economic, but strategic and moral. Trident is strategically useless, and nuclear weapons are inherently immoral. There is, however, no question that we cannot afford Trident.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally. The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to encourage certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and to discourage others. They are not where the State's money comes from. There is no such thing as "taxpayers' money", a political slogan that, like many of those, has no connection to actual fact.

Last December, it was controversial to point this out. But these days, only the Labour frontbench still does not do so. And even some of them know that it is true.

If there might be a Trident Dividend, then it would be to take the £205 billion cited by CND, round it up to £210 billion, and then give an extra £70 billion to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would buy a great deal of political capital, and it would do much to still the hostilities that break out periodically among the Services, including in the pages of The Times and the Daily Telegraph.

This would be within a context in which military force itself would be used only ever in self-defence, while BAE Systems had been renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in order to preserve the skills that were currently employed in the arms industry.