Tagged with Trident

It’s time for the Left to take defence policy seriously

LabourDefenceReview The recent, empty point-scoring, hoo hah over the misfiring UK Trident missile test, and the flag-waving, posturing in Parliament and the mass media last year over the, up to £100bn, renewal of the Trident ballistic missile system, has highlighted yet again the ideological vulnerability of the Labour Left on defence issues.

Quite understandably, the left, working within a capitalist state with a major colonial/imperialist past, and now a junior partner, in the global structures of “Pax Americana”, has tended to respond with “nothing to do with me guv”, or an outright pacifist, approach to problems of the UK defence strategy and capabilities. The exception to this lack of interest being the Left’s almost universal hostility to nuclear weapons, from the moment Labour’s Attlee government established the UK as a nuclear weapons state – without informing the full Cabinet, never mind Parliament! The spirit of that decision has been well-described: Continue reading →

Labour demands answers into Trident nuclear test ‘misfire’

Trident II missile (US Defense Dept)Labour are demanding a “full explanation” of why Theresa May four times dodged the question of whether or not she knew about a calamitous failure on a Trident missile test last summer, just months before the House of Commons met to debate the controversial programme’s renewal. Andrew Marr asked Theresa May, “did you know the misfire of the missile had occurred when you made your first speech about Trident to Parliament in July 2016?”

HMS Vengeance, one of the UK’s four Trident submarines, which each carry up to forty-eight nuclear warheads, was running a test off the coast of Florida in December 2015 when it fired an unarmed missile at a sea target off the coast of West Africa, some 9,000km away. Instead of flying towards its intended target, the missile flew towards the US coast, the BBC reports.  Continue reading →

Whatever happened to Trident?

Trident II missile (US Defense Dept)Among the reasons for concern that Labour has still not broken with its tradition of forming policy out of sight of party members, and with scant concern for their views, is the handling of policy on Trident. Our ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ became something of an iconic issue for the left and a subject where the left and centre of the party could unite.

The Left Futures website illustrates the importance given to the issue by the number of articles devoted to it. The subject has been returned to probably more than any other issue except austerity. Since January 2013 there have been thirteen articles on Trident. Four of them were published earlier this year. Not a single one found any case for renewing our nuclear weapons. The only article with anything positive to say about Trident was one by a trade union official which considered Trident renewal without nuclear weapons. Continue reading →

Trident advocates must answer their critics

Trident II missile (US Defense Dept)On 23 February the Guardian carried an article entitled Labour’s Trident debate needs to be based on facts by former Labour Defence Ministers John Hutton and George Robertson who start by saying that disagreement over Trident is “legitimate” but that the case for nuclear weapons is “self-evident“. This ‘my opponent has a right to his/her views but they are obviously barmy’ line of rhetoric might pass muster in a student debate but it is not worthy of serious discussion about our future defence strategy. Unfortunately the whole article continues in this vein.

Hutton and Robertson claim that the Labour Party defence review is descending into “chaos and incoherence” but provide no evidence of this. Perhaps they feel that their say-so is sufficient. In fact Emily Thornberry has produced a very calm and rational review paper which invites all strands of opinion to reconsider defence from first principles. It is remarkable that our two authors fail to refer to it. I guess that for them the failure to  proceed from “self-evident” conclusions is evidence of both chaos and incoherence. Continue reading →

Corbyn and the Israel/Islam/Putin/Trident critique

Hammer Corbyn1An entire journalistic cottage industry now exists (such as here and here and here and here) devoted to making the claim that Jeremy Corbyn is an overgrown adolescent CNDer harbouring a lingering atavistic attachment to Russian nationalism, with participants frequently coming as close as libel laws permit to averring outright anti-semitism on the Labour leader’s part.

It’s not that Jezza is actually a goose-stepping proto-pogromist himself, the story goes. And probably he wouldn’t have given Litvinenko that polonium-210 laced cuppa with his own fair hand. But that’s only because he normally gets Seumas Milne to run FSB errand boy duties for him. Continue reading →