The Labour party may have avoided a divisive vote on Trident this week, but that doesn’t mean that it can always avoid working out whether it should have a new position. Last night Maria Eagle, the Shadow Defence Secretary, told a fringe that though she had made her mind in 2007 that she was in favour of the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, she wouldn’t have resigned had there been a vote that called for Trident to be scrapped at this conference.
She said she’d reminded Corbyn when he offered her the job that she was pro-Trident, saying ‘I thought I need to make sure he remembers what my position is on this, because I don’t want him to appoint me without remembering, and he did remember, he knew what my position was and he still offered me the job and I accepted the job on the basis that we are going to have a debate, and I think this exemplifies this new politics’.
She argued that the party’s policymaking processes meant that ‘resolutions that are passed do not automatically become party policy, they are passed on as having been carried by conference to the National Policy Forum’. The shadow minister added:
‘So even if a contemporary resolution saying we’re against Trident had been passed by the conference this week, by the way I don’t think it would have been, but even if it had been, that would not ave changed party policy: party policy, call me old-fashioned, is what has been decided to be thus far and that is that we are in favour of having a nuclear deterrent, a continuous at-sea deterrent…’
The party has ‘our ways of coming to a collective decision about this’, she added. She made the same point when asked about the potential for British involvement in air strikes against the so-called Islamic State in Syria: that Jeremy takes one view but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the party’s view. Though on the basis of what Jeremy Corbyn and his frontbenchers have said this week, the new leader has his ways of having strong beliefs on matters while not trying to press them on his party.
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