Starmer jokes about the ongoing Labour benefits row that people agree with him over the need to make hard choices but then say “we don’t like that hard choice, isn’t there another one you can make?”
— Lizzy Buchan (@LizzyBuchan) July 18, 2023
So you’ll be scrapping Trident renewal then? #Priorities https://t.co/sqa6DnmayD
— Màiri McAllan (@MairiMcAllan) July 18, 2023
To some extent Màiri McAllan might be regarded as ‘part of the problem’, because she played her part in installing, for purely factional reasons, an SNP leader who – even among the initial longer list of potential candidates – stood out as particularly unpopular with the public. But credit where it’s due – Ms McAllan has very handily provided an answer to the question asked in jest by Keir Starmer of what “hard choice” he should be making instead of keeping children locked in poverty if they happen to be born into a larger family.
If you say to any Blairite, including Starmer, that they need to face up to the tough decision of scrapping Britain’s insanely expensive and utterly pointless nuclear weapons system so that children don’t have to live in poverty, their answer will invariably be something along the lines of “I will NEVER play fast and loose with the security of our country”. Or, to put it another way, “I don’t like that tough choice, give me another, preferably one that involves kids going hungry”.
Sorry, Keir, but *real* Tough Men make the Toughest Choices, and that means the Trident issue has to be faced up to. Part of that involves the UK being brutally honest with itself about its real motivations for spending hundreds of billions of pounds on weapons of mass destruction we simply can’t afford, when according to Labour “there is no money left”. Is it really about defending these islands, or it just a bizarrely costly way of boosting national status – sort of like Concorde but with genocide attached?
You’d have to say the genesis of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme would suggest it’s the latter. Ernest Bevin famously said after the atomic bombings against Japan: “We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs….We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.” It was all about retaining ‘Great Power’ status and parity with the US, and in that regard total success technologically was coupled, ironically, with total failure strategically. Within a few years, the UK had both the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, making it only the third country to attain both, and yet it had still slipped to being a middle-ranking power while the US and Soviet Union soared ahead to become the sole superpowers.
So the money “invested” in Trident doesn’t work as a shortcut to status, but does it work as a “deterrent”? Well, no, and if you ever doubt that, ask yourself why the UK government doesn’t argue or even accept that Germany, Spain or Poland all need their own “independent nuclear deterrents” or would be helpless without them. The reply would be that all of these countries are members of NATO, that NATO is a nuclear weapons alliance, and therefore they are all “protected” by the American nuclear “deterrent” and thus don’t need to duplicate that themselves. OK, then in that case, why does Britain, which as a NATO member is also automatically “protected” by the American “deterrent”, need to duplicate it? Especially given that the UK possesses only a tiny fraction of the nuclear weapons that the US does. What does it actually add?
Logically, there are only two possible answers. Firstly, it could be that the UK thinks there are circumstances in which it might wish to attack a country with nuclear weapons against the wishes of the Americans – although the mind boggles as to what those circumstances could possibly be, or why it could ever be thought to be a good thing. Or secondly, there could be a fear that one day the US might retreat back into the isolationism of the early 20th Century, and that one or two other NATO countries therefore need to have nuclear weapons as a back-up. But neither of those explanations make any sense, because unlike France, the UK has not maintained a nuclear weapons system that is genuinely independent and can function without American cooperation. The weapons are not owned by the UK, they are leased from the US. Testing occurs in the US. The submarines themselves have to periodically go to the US for maintenance.
To all intents and purposes, then, Trident is just an outpost of the American nuclear empire, albeit one that we pay through the nose to put the Union Jack on top of. For as long as the US and UK remain allied, Trident is a pointless duplication. But if that alliance is broken, Trident essentially ceases to exist anyway. So whichever way you cut it, Britain is wasting hundreds of billions of pounds on something which is utterly useless. But is Keir Starmer prepared to make the Tough Choice of redirecting that wasted money into the far more necessary and valuable endeavour of cutting child poverty? Och, don’t be daft. The theoretical capacity to inflict instant genocide at the push of a button against the people of Russia (or whoever the designated enemy of the day is) will ALWAYS come first for ALL British Prime Ministers of both the Tory and Blairite varieties.
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