Nats go nuclear on the Lib Dems

Tiberius

I trust someone will also ask Alex Salmond how he reconciles his support for further EU integration (and the euro grants that would follow for Scotland) with his opposition to the destruction of the Scottish fishing industry by the CFP.

Naomi Muse

It can get shuffled into the spending review anyway, whatever the vote tonight.

Ron Wilson

The destruction of Scottish fishing was a direct consequence of Scotland's subordinate and powerless position within the English/Brit state.
The betrayal of Scotland's fishing communities has its roots in the London government's policy of using Scotland's fishing grounds as a bargaining chip in negotiations concerning entry to the Common Market.
An object lesson in the consequences arising from meekly permitting others to govern your own country.
So nothing to do with Mr Salmond, but everything to do with the rotten union.

ajs

Oh Mr Wilson:
you are of course entitled to put your point of view, but sadly, what an ass you make of yourself in so doing.

Dr Strangelove

I hope the Lib Dems don't break their manifesto promise. It's absurd to have a Strategic Defence Review but leave out the biggest, most expensive defence item (£97bn.) the country will spend over the next 30 years

Hysteria

leaving our one strategic weapon system out of a strategic defence review does seem a tad odd.........

Ron Wilson

ajs, facts are chiels that winna ding.

Ron Wilson

Indeed, ajs would do well to reflect that in the 1970’s the Conservative government said that the fishing industry was 'expendable'. In subsequent decades successive Labour and Tory governments concurred with this view by signing us up to the CFP.
And it was David Cameron who reversed his party's policy of withdrawing the UK from the Common Fisheries Policy.
Which is why Scotland needs the power to stand up for vital national interests, with a seat at the top European table, the power of independence.
The same Independence that Coffee House readers regard as axiomatic for ‘Britain’. But of course, we’re really talking about England here …. perfidious Albion or plain hypocrisy?

DZ

Oh dear. Hull? Grimsby? Fleetwood? South Shields? Plymouth? Just about everywhere in Cornwall? But I agree with the sentiment. The fishing industry was a political football. But would it have been chosen as a sacrificial lamb if it had been modernising and meeting the markets?

Ned Ludd

Tax the rich and kill the poor? it's just as stupid a comment as abandoning the nations defences at a time of heightened world tension.

Tony E

Mr Wilson. I would contest your version of events.
As I understand it, on the night before the British government were to sight the treaty of Rome, the other countries agreed to add the CFP to the aquis communitaire. It was never part of the negotiations and it was very much news to the UK government.

I agree that Heath should have seen that as a direct attempt to exact a further price on the British and withdrawn. He did not now how stong his hand was - France was desperate to get us in so that it could fund the CAP, it's economy was dangerously unbalanced.

Ronnie

DZ.

'But would it have been chosen as a sacrificial lamb if it had been modernising and meeting the markets?'

If memory serves, the industry was doing both at the time, with increased levels of investment in modern boats and equipment. This made it doubly frustrating for those many who were forced to tie up as a result of their industry being decimated by Westminster and Brussels. Britain's problem was one of being an island with a traditionally large fishing industry which other EU countries access to.

David Lindsay

Why are the Conservatives not voting to review Trident, or even to scap it? Far from representing national pride or independence, our nuclear weapons programme has only ever represented the wholesale subjugation of Britain’s defence capability to a foreign power. That power maintains no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, almost none of which have nuclear weapons. Like radiological, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries while actually governing no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?

Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to “play with the big boys”, thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time for Britain to grow up. Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.

Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are these therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7 July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11 September 2001 were against the country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The only “nuclear power” in the Middle East is Israel. Is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East? It is mind-boggling to hear people go on about Iran, whose President is in any case many years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and in any case only wants one (if he does) to use against the only Middle Eastern country that already has them. What does any of this have to do with us?

Numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the Fifties and Sixties. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO. Enoch Powell denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle. The rural populist John G Diefenbaker, who opposed official bilingualism in Canada’s English-speaking provinces, and who campaigned for his flag to remain the Canadian Red Ensign with the Union Flag in its corner, also kept JFK’s nukes off Canadian soil.

Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

There could not be bigger and more unwise spending, or a more ineffective example of the “Big State”, than nuclear weapons in general and Trident in particular. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, and towards paying off our national debt, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. It is what Disraeli would have done.