Trident

Debate between Sheryll Murray and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, for permission to speak in this debate. I apologise to the House for the fact that because I was chairing a public sitting of the Defence Committee I could not be here for the opening speeches. For that reason, too, I have deliberately refrained from making any interventions.

Although the issue of strategic nuclear deterrence is very divisive, we can all agree that the calibre of the speeches on both sides of the House—and on both sides of the argument—has been very high indeed. If the Chairman of the Defence Committee had to mirror the views of its members, I would probably spend just over 90% of my time arguing passionately in favour of the nuclear deterrent and just under 10% of it arguing equally passionately against it, because we have, and are delighted to have, on the Committee the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman), who is a consistent and thoughtful opponent of Trident.

Fortunately, however, I do not have to mirror those views. The views I am expected to put forward are clearly marked as my own, and they have been pretty much the same for 35 years, half of them outside this House and the remainder inside this House. On my having been elected to chair the Defence Committee, something may have come as a bit of a surprise to people who looked at the list of the five hon. Members from the Labour Opposition who were kind enough to nominate me to that role. One was the shadow Armed Forces Minister, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and that is hardly a surprise. However, at the other end of the spectrum, I was fortunate enough to enjoy the support of the current Leader of the Opposition. The reason was that we both agree on one thing. Even though our views on whether we should continue to have a nuclear deterrent are diametrically opposed, we both agree that both sides of the case have a good argument to make, and that when we make it on the Floor of the House, everybody learns something.

With the support of the now Leader of the Opposition, I managed to secure, on 17 January 2013, the first full debate on the whole issue of Trident and deterrence in the main Chamber since the vote on 14 March 2007 when the initial gate was approved. Anybody who really wants to see both sides of the intellectual argument at their best could do no better than to get a copy of that debate, from which I shall repeat my five main military arguments.

I fear that I will not have enough time to deal with the point about cyber-vulnerability, so I commend to the House the article in The Guardian today in which Franklin Miller, a leading expert for 20 years on the American nuclear systems and, indeed, the holder of an honorary knighthood from this country, explains why there is no question of the nuclear deterrent being connected in any way to the internet and being in any way vulnerable in that regard. Similarly, on the question of tiers, I merely say that tier 2 threats are often more dangerous than tier 1 threats, and that is why the Defence Committee has just published a report in which we challenge the utility of ranking threats in this way.

Let me now stick to reciting my few arguments. There is not much time for any detail unless someone is kind enough to intervene on me. The first of the military arguments is the most important of all: that future military threats and conflicts will be no more predictable than those that engulfed us throughout the 20th century. That is the overriding justification for preserving armed forces in peacetime as a national insurance policy.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that deterrence is probably our best defence?