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Speech in Westminster Parliament Jim Devine |
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| 14 March 2007 | ||
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Mr. Jim Devine (Livingston) (Lab): I am very proud of the Labour Government. My constituency has record employment; we have seen the introduction of the minimum wage; there is justice for pensioners; there is record investment in our public services. I hope that Front-Bench Members recognise that when someone like me votes against the Government and resigns as a parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Health, it is not an easy decision. It has been a hard decision, but I believed that I should come to the House to explain it. As the House is aware, Robin Cook was my predecessor. The week before he died in August 2005, the very last article he wrote was in The Guardian on this subject. He said: “It was the Wilson government of the 60s that built, launched and named the Polaris fleet. It was Jim Callaghan who first struck the Trident deal with President Carter... There could not be a more convincing way for Tony Blair to break from the past and to demonstrate that he is a true moderniser than by making the case that nuclear weapons now have no relevance to Britain's defences in the modern world... the spirit of the cold war lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go of fear and who need an enemy to buttress their own identity. Hence the vacuum left by the cold war has been filled by George Bush's global war on terror...nuclear weapons are hopelessly irrelevant to that terrorist threat. The elegant theories of deterrence all appear beside the point in the face of a suicide bomber who actively courts martyrdom. And if we ever were deluded enough to wreak our revenge by unleashing a latter-day Hiroshima on a Muslim city, we would incite fanatical terrorism against ourselves for a generation.” I hope that when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence sums up, he gives some indication of when he would see a nuclear weapon being used. The article pointed out that “all levels of the Trident system depend on US cooperation. The missiles are not even owned by us, but are leased from the Pentagon in an arrangement that Denis Healey once dubbed as ‘rent-a-rocket’. Renewing our collaboration with the US on nuclear weapons will deepen the bonds between Downing Street and the White House, at the very time when the rest of the nation longs for a more independent stance.” It is absurd that Britain should maintain its nuclear weapons to guarantee its security while lecturing Iran, et al, that the safety of the world will be compromised if they behave in the same way. Despite the anxieties about proliferation, more nations have given up nuclear weapons in the last generation than have developed them. It has been pointed out that Brazil, Argentine, Ukraine and South Africa have given up weapons, and none of them regard themselves as less safe or secure then before; nor need we if the leadership can find courage to allow Trident to be the end of Britain's futile and costly obsession with nuclear weapon status. |