Labour is out this morning insisting they can be trusted with national security – honest! Keir Starmer’s latest wheeze is a ‘nuclear deterrent triple lock’ aimed at giving a ‘total commitment to securing the UK’s future nuclear deterrent.’ Such a ground-breaking policy includes such prior commitments as, er, upgrading the current fleet, maintaining a continuous at-sea deterrent and the construction of four new nuclear submarines at Barrow-in-Furness.
Indeed, the only thing that seems new about Labour’s big nuclear announcement is its sheer chutzpah. For at least a dozen members of Starmer’s own hand-picked shadow cabinet have previously voted against renewing Trident – including his chosen man to be Foreign Secretary, David Lammy. Starmer Chameleon might insist that ‘My shadow cabinet is behind me on this’ but Mr S thought it worth revisiting Lammy’s own rhetoric from the far-flung days of, um, 2016 when he passionately declared that:
I joined the CND as a teenager over 20 years ago because I grew up under an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation… many of us now seem to have lost sight of the senselessness of the stockpiling of these weapons and the utter barbarity of the concept of mutually assured destruction…. What we are talking about is a weapons system that is explicitly designed and primed to be used as a means to totally destroy entire nations and to kill millions of people. I simply do not accept that there can ever be circumstances in which it would be permissible to deliberately target millions of innocent civilians in this way… I cannot vote in favour of spending so much money on renewing our nuclear weaponry when the human cost of austerity is so grave. To do so would be a dereliction of my duty to represent the people that I was elected to serve.
No ‘circumstances in which it would be permissible’ eh? So much for a deterrent…
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