How to save the planet

In his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes Winston Churchill’s famous warning in 1936. Admonishing those who were ‘only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent’, Churchill declared: ‘The era of procrastination, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.’

It is not surprising that Mr Gore and his green disciples should find this quotation alluring in their campaign for radical action against environmental change. But Churchill’s words are still resonant — or should be — in the debate on 21st-century global defence. How many politicians in this country are deaf to the lesson of his warning was depressingly clear in this week’s debate on Trident.

The Commons vote on Wednesday may well be an augury of things to come. If Labour scrapes home at the next election with a small majority, or cobbles together a coalition with the Lib Dems, it will be deeply vulnerable to such revolts, and frequently dependent upon enlightened Tory support. Prime Minister Brown, habituated as Chancellor to healthy Commons majorities, could find himself hostage to a small group of backbenchers, just as John Major was between 1992 and 1997.

Mr Major’s tormentors were Eurosceptics, who probably represented the public’s views on the European Union more accurately than he did. In contrast, Mr Brown would find himself in hock to the unreconstructed Left: the irreducible socialist core of the Labour party that has been hibernating during the long Blair winter. Much has been made of the deal Mr Brown might have to do with Sir Menzies Campbell after the next election if there is a hung parliament.