Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t want nuclear weapons. We all know that. We also know that because he has a huge mandate (a phrase bandied about so much at this conference that it’s starting to feel like a refrain in Are You Being Served?), he’s keen to turn his views into official party policy on this area at least. But we now also know that if his party determined that it would remain committed to Trident, and if Jeremy Corbyn were Prime Minister, he wouldn’t ever use his weapons anyway. Which makes it entirely pointless to fund them at all.
On the Today programme, the new Labour leader was asked if he would approve the use of Trident if he were in Downing Street. He replied:
‘No – 187 countries don’t feel the need to have a nuclear weapon to protect their security, why should those five need it themselves?
‘We are not in the era of the Cold War any more, it finished a long time ago.’
The way nuclear weapons work is that people sort of assume that countries are maintaining them with a view to actually using them if attacked, not just as something to keep staff at Faslane busy. The clue is in the name ‘continuous at-sea deterrent’. They are a deterrent.
But what Corbyn was suggesting was that it may be his official government policy – because his party has democratically decided that in spite of his huge mandate that a deterrent is a good thing – to spend £20bn upgrading Trident, but really he will never use that deterrent anyway, and he’s happy to say that publicly. So the assumption that you could use the deterrent if provoked evaporates – it is no longer a deterrent.
Some Labourites may feel this is rather hypothetical, given Corbyn’s own brand of Labour politics will, they argue, act as a deterrent to voters. Their more immediate concern is that Corbyn will use his huge mandate to force a stronger position on Trident. He upgraded his stance yesterday from being a debate in the party regardless of his personal position to ‘I’ve made my own position on one issue clear. And I believe I have a mandate from my election on it.’ Given Shadow Cabinet members would resign if forced to oppose the renewal of Trident, we’re about to find out whether Corbyn’s huge mandate really is a powerful weapon.
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