SO FAREWELL then, Trident. Some of us always said we would never need you and so it has proved. In all of our recent and current wars you were an exotic, wasteful irrelevance. The silver lining in today's economic black cloud is that you are now surely about to become the first and most welcome casualty of the recession.
Readers should not just take this column's word for it (as if). Scrapping Trident is now the popular option of a growing and impressive consensus among people who matter, including some of the unlikeliest converts. When the more right-wing Tories con
clude that Trident is a redundant relic and we can't afford it, they put themselves shoulder to shoulder with the SNP, most of the Labour party, unions, churches and all the other usual suspects.
To that list can be added a clutch of military top brass now in retirement including Lord Bramall, the field marshal who was chief of defence staff, and a brace of generals. They almost certainly speak unofficially for today's defence chiefs when they say with remarkable candour: "Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism. Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics."
To recap: Trident is nearing the end of its pointless life. Government calculations for upgrading it suggest we need £21 billion for starters. Giving it another lease of life would soak up another £110bn over time, perhaps much more. The sums are simply absurd, especially in the present economic morass. The very idea of spending on this scale is a guaranteed vote loser for any party struggling to contain national economic collapse when it takes power.
Trident, unlike its French nuclear counterpart, was never a truly "independent" deterrent anyway. Almost certainly Britain could never have used it without American permission. I doubt if it or its predecessors were ever a meaningful deterrent even during the Cold War. How many of us can put hand on heart and say we lost sleep over an impending Soviet nuclear attack?
If there ever was any point to Trident it was this: it allowed the crumbling nation state which is the United Kingdom to parade itself as a world power with a seat in the UN Security Council. And, of course, one of these days in the not too distant future we shall probably see Britain and France replaced there by the European Union.
What is astonishing in the lingering death of Trident is Labour's attitude. It is almost as if the Government – as distinct from the governing party – is in denial. Only the other day, Iain Gray, the Scottish Labour leader, showed himself apparently still thirled to Trident, and for all the wrong reasons. He leads a party in Scotland, after all, which has repeatedly over the years called for the abandonment of Trident, only to be ignored by its ministers in London.
In Holyrood, Gray echoed Gordon Brown in attacking the SNP's anti-Trident stance, claiming decommissioning would cost Scotland 11,000 jobs. This figure is fast being accorded the status of inviolate truth on the basis of some very dodgy logic.
According to respected critics of the Trident programme such as Isobel Lindsay and some independent thinkers in the STUC, the scrapping of Trident would have exactly the opposite effect on employment. It would create, not destroy jobs.
Stands to reason that, even if just a fraction of the tens of billions saved was invested locally, there would be a burgeoning of employment. "With the necessary political will and a little imagination these resources could provide a massive boost to manufacturing industry in Scotland and help to secure energy supplies and assist in the fight against climate change," the STUC states with compelling common sense. Lindsay argues for any Trident job losses to be replaced by development in alternative energy and points out the stark fact that, since 1990, Scotland has lost, not gained, 40,000 defence jobs.
When Trident is scrapped it will be replaced by conventional weaponry requiring a workforce, perhaps in equal numbers. So the idea that those who favour scrapping Trident want to sack 11,000 workers and do Scotland a disservice is a pathetic argument and dishonest government spin. In truth the dumping of Trident will spare money for where it is needed such as kitting out our notoriously under-resourced ground forces.
What Labour does with Trident doesn't matter much any more. If this Government decides to keep it, it won't be able to pay for it, and the incoming Tories will scrap it anyway. All the signs are there. When Tory luminaries like David Cameron himself, David Davis and Nicholas Soames stand united in sympathising with George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, who says they simply can't afford to renew Trident, then the game really is up.
How this will go down in the Ministry of Defence is interesting. This is the department which recently spent £2.3bn refurbishing its offices. Just think of that for a moment. Some routine sprucing up cost us the equivalent of five Scottish Parliaments and no one uttered a cheep of protest.
There's more. Our Government's spending priorities require us to press on with spending more than £5bn for identity cards. We are so hard up that the Treasury is now balking at stumping up £90m a time for 40 Eurofighters – and that's just the latest batch. We simply can't afford them but we can't afford not to buy them because defaulting would cost billions.
But at least a case exists for the Eurofighter and conventional weaponry which is more than could ever be said for poor old, useless, Trident. The sooner the deed is done, the better.
