The Shadow Cabinet has its session with Emily Thornberry on Trident today. At least there are fewer people so she cannot be shouted down, as she was at points in last night’s parliamentary Labour party meeting. But there are a number of MPs at the table who only joined Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench on the understanding that they would be able to vote in favour of Trident renewal when the time came.
Andy Burnham made it clear on the Today programme this morning that there was no way Thornberry would be able to find a ‘third way’ on this, and that it would be ‘impossible’ to get the two sides to agree:
‘We always knew this was going to be a difficult debate for the party, there are two positions here that are difficult to reconcile, maybe impossible to reconcile, and the party has got to find some way of accommodating those positions and move forward, and not let this issue take over everything.’
He added that ‘most people have found that [hybrid options] just don’t work and that instead the party needed to work out a way for both sides to stick to their positions so that Labour can move on:
‘So the discussion has been in the party about ‘can you realistically try and find a sort of halfway house? And most people have concluded that you can’t. And therefore, you know, if there are two positions that are deeply held on both sides but can’t easily be reconciled, the party must find some way of accommodating that and allowing people to move forward. And actually move on to other issues and hold the Government to account on many other issues where it’s failing people.’
Burnham seems to be in a rather reflective mood at present, picking over his own leadership campaign and worrying in public about his party’s ability to scrutinise the Government. His point about the Trident issue is one that many of his colleagues share, which is that even if Jeremy Corbyn succeeds in changing Labour policy on renewing the nuclear deterrent, it will still go ahead. There is nothing Labour as the Opposition can do to stop Trident renewal, and so it is currently having a totally pointless row that is taking up a great deal of time and energy while the Tories proceed with policies that Labour would normally be fighting tooth and nail.
But how can Labour really find a way of multilateralists and unilateralists peacefully coexisting? It is inconceivable that the party could have no policy on Trident at all, or two mutually exclusive policies that two sides then set out two separate stalls on at the election. So it must have a policy. Retaining the existing policy is the least worst option for Corbyn and Thornberry, even though it goes against what they think and makes Corbyn look weak as a leader. It would, though, be pointless, too, because Corbyn has already made clear that he wouldn’t press the button, which makes the deterrent not a deterrent, but a submarine with nuclear warheads on it that is just going for a delightful pootle around the seas, not a real threat to anyone who would consider attacking the UK. So the whole situation is entirely impossible.
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