Integrated Review?

On the one hand there is Tory realism. In this case, that accepts the fact, however unhappily, that the world's dominant power was now China. Like India, or Japan, or Australia, the United States remained a key partner in putting together alliances in order to deal with China. But China, and not America, was now the point.

On the other hand there is Crazy neoconnery, shrieking hysterically about Russia, of all places, as if we were under threat from its declining population, from its GDP smaller than Italy's, from the antique navy that it periodically sailed down the Channel, and from the occasional incursions into our airspace of its planes with propellers. Threat of what, exactly? What is Russia supposed to want to do to us? And why? What on earth would the Russians want with Britain?

Boris Johnson had thought that today would mark a major redefinition of the centre ground. The China hawks would have been shot down. Meanwhile, a phased but quite drastic reduction in nuclear weapons could have been defended by accusing the Labour Leadership of wanting to scrap them altogether. For some reason, there is a taboo against suggesting that.

But instead, the neocon Crazies are back in charge of the Labour Party, as they and their predecessors usually have been. For fear of being outflanked by the likes of Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, we now have to endure a deranged proposal to increase our nuclear arsenal by 40 per cent, justified by waving shrouds and screaming blue murder about Russia. Even if Russia really had somehow hacked the 2016 Brexit referendum and American Presidential Election, and the truth was simply that you lost them, then what use would Trident have been against that? What use was Trident against that?

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 control inflation to the politically chosen extent while encouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while discouraging 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.

In December 2019, 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.