Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks about Trident have, unsurprisingly, been picked up everywhere this morning. The Labour leader told Andrew Marr yesterday that he could consider a ‘deterrent’ in which submarines continued to patrol the seas, but just without any nuclear warheads. He said the submarines ‘don’t have to have nuclear warheads on them’, adding:
‘There are options there; the paper that Emily Thornberry put forward is a very interesting one, deserves a very good study of it and read of it and I hope there will be a serious mature response to what is a very serious and hopefully mature debate about the nature of security and insecurity, the nature of the way in which we protect ourselves against insecurity and we bring about a more secure world as a result.’
This naturally sparked fury from some pro-nuclear MPs, derision from the Conservatives and the SNP alike, who both want to paint Labour as weak on Trident, albeit from rather different stances themselves.
It’s not clear what Corbyn might put on the boats instead of nuclear warheads, but it’s also not hugely surprising that the Labour leader would try to come up with this sort of solution. He has campaigned against Trident all his life. He also doesn’t like confrontations, and may have seen the non-nuclear Trident option as a non-nuclear political option, too. The response of some of his MPs contains almost faux surprise that their leader, who has never hidden his views on the nuclear deterrent, is trying to make Labour a unilateralist party.
Labour looks like it’s having a 1980s reunion at the moment, particularly after Corbyn managed to talk about Trident, the Falklands and trade union pickets over the weekend. But what’s more important than that is how the Labour leader decides to approach his party when it comes to making a decision, rather than shooting the breeze on TV, on Trident renewal. As I say in the Times today, there are a number of different forces in his office pushing for different approaches. If he takes a hardline approach to the issue – the nuclear option, politically – then Corbyn’s parliamentary party will descend into understandable uproar.
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