Why Brown pressed the nuclear button

NEVER will insults have sounded sweeter to a politician's ears. Gordon Brown would have welcomed every brickbat thrown at him last Wednesday night after he declared to a businessmen's dinner that he favours keeping Britain's nuclear weapons. The CND denounced him as a hypocrite, Clare Short declared herself his sworn enemy and other left-wing Labour MPs declared him a capitalist brute. There could be no better character reference for a Chancellor who is about to sell himself to Middle England.

Project Gordon, the remaking of the Chancellor, has always included a battle with left-wingers. To win the trust of suburban England, he needs to be seen as the nemesis of the Labour Left - just as Tony Blair was. Yet he has relied on the left for his power base, and his leadership ambitions are pinned on the support of the trade unions. His mission now is to pick a fake fight with them over issues which don't matter so he can be voted in and change issues which do matter.

On the issues which divide Westminster politics today, Brown is firmly on the left. He favours centralised control over public services, and has stood athwart Blair's pro-market 'choice' agenda. His social agenda is driven by belief in welfare handouts, rather than empowerment. He will soon have pushed UK taxes to their highest rate in British history. His nightmare is being challenged for the Labour leadership by someone like John Reid, who would make these points with devastating clarity.

When Blair eventually goes, perhaps as early as this autumn, the Chancellor places the utmost importance on who will stand against him. He dare not fight a Labour opponent who will say "tax is too high" or "control freakery is not the answer". He needs one saying "ban the bomb" or "renationalise British Airways". He needs an old class warrior still wearing the face paint of the 1980s, who thinks that the Private Finance Initiative is a moral outrage. He needs to re-enact the leadership battle of 1994, and for this he needs to fight the old enemies. There is no better issue to rile them than nuclear arms.

Brown's remarks last week should have been utterly uncontroversial. He is in favour of "retaining our independent nuclear deterrent" - the alternative to this is unilateral nuclear disarmament, which went down rather badly with the electorate when Neil Kinnock proposed it during the 1987 general election. The public could see then, as they can now, that the threat of nuclear retaliation is a strong guarantor of peace and the outside world is an increasingly hostile place.

In fact, world spending on ballistic missiles is growing faster than at any time since the Cold War. Last Christmas, Russia tested a nuclear missile more powerful than anything devised by the Soviets, designed to dodge American missile defence shields. The problem with nuclear missiles is they take 15 years to build, so the task is to read the world in 2020. Can we be sure that the Kremlin will not have fallen to a despot, and that Britain will not have need for its deterrent? Or that Iran will not have succeeded where Saddam Hussein failed?

The real question is how much of a nuclear deterrent Britain needs, and how much to spend on it. Might the four Vanguard class submarines at Faslane be replaced after 2024 by a smaller, cheaper nuclear deterrent? The Chancellor's form of words were so vague as to allow him to halve the nuclear bomb budget, and switch to a lower-impact device. He made maximum impact last week, with minimum commitment. Rhetorically, it was a direct hit.

The Labour left is denouncing him, he basks in their condemnation, but he will need much more of it. To cement his image as scourge of Old Labour, he will need several months of hostility and may well be persuaded to lift the public sector retirement age from its current limit. This would mean tearing up the deal agreed by Tony Blair last October when he caved in and allowed state employees to retire aged 60. Brown could single-handedly revoke it. He would be seen as tougher on the left than even Blair.

It is also a rather synthetic issue. Blair's deal means that anyone joining (or returning to) the civil service must retire at the higher age of 65. Staff turnover rate is so high - one in 10 government workers quit each year - that by the end of this decade, fewer than a third of civil servants will have stayed long enough to qualify for the retire-at-60 deal. If the Chancellor were to revoke this, it would affect the minimum number of workers while creating the maximum amount of fuss.

Within Westminster, many of Brown's left-wing supporters know the situation he is in. I spoke to one last week, who explained his strategy: his allies will pretend to oppose him at first, but swing behind him at the end. With good reason, they consider him genuinely committed to the great aim of a 'progressive' agenda - that is, steadily growing taxation, public spending and social protection so the UK more closely resembles the Eurozone. This is what Brown is all about.

To complete his left-wing mission, he needs to keep the right-wing press and voters on side - which he has found can be done by using the right language. He talks about the work ethic while paying 5.3 million to be out-of-work and on benefits. He extols the American economic model while taking British state spending past Germany and even Greece, for the first time in history. (On this league table, Scotland stands as the world's third most socialised country, behind Sweden and France.)

Admirers of Brown will have learnt to accept the gap between his deeds and words. He says nothing about redistribution of wealth, yet has transferred more money from rich to poor than any other Labour minister, ever. He never mentioned a desire to forge a cross-party consensus on sharply higher taxes, yet pulled this off by stealth. It now falls to him to stage a battle with Labour's left while following its tax-and-spend agenda more faithfully than anyone in the party's history has dared.