Trident Renewal

Lord Walney Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Angus Robertson]

The difficulty with that position, of course, is that, were it true, it would mean that Germany, Italy and Spain were not safe and required nuclear weapons. In fact, it is the same argument made by the North Korean regime, which believes it needs nuclear weapons to protect itself. It is a dangerous argument to pursue.

I have yet to hear a supporter of Trident convincingly explain in what circumstances they would be prepared to justify the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and the causing of massive environmental damage to the world for generations to come. Those are the consequences of using nuclear weapons, and surely if one has them, one has to be prepared to use them. I have yet to hear anybody give an example of circumstances where they would be prepared to kill millions of people.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Angus Robertson]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain in what circumstances he would be in favour of using nuclear weapons?

[John Woodcock]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain the logic of his party’s position? It thinks that nuclear weapons are an abomination, but wants an independent Scotland to remain part of NATO, which is an explicitly nuclear alliance founded on the concept of overall nuclear protection.

[Angus Robertson]

The hon. Gentleman overlooks the fact that the position of the SNP on NATO is exactly the same as that taken by the Governments of Denmark and Norway—countries that have provided the most recent NATO Secretaries-General. Those countries do not want to possess or host nuclear weapons, which is exactly the SNP’s position, but that has not precluded their participation in NATO. Perhaps having countries take that position might offer the opportunity to change the global approach to nuclear weapons currently pursued by NATO and nuclear-hosting states.

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[Michael Fallon]

Indeed, we should certainly be concerned about the lack of progress in the talks that have been dragging on for months now, and we should be particularly concerned about the military dimension to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Let me deal now with the position of the official Opposition. On 14 November, the shadow Defence Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary wrote to the Prime Minister declaring that Britain should maintain

“a minimum credible independent, nuclear deterrent, delivered through a Continuous At-Sea Deterrent”.

However, on 5 January this year, the Leader of the Opposition told Andrew Marr that

“we have got to have the least-cost deterrent that we can have, and that’s my philosophy.”

How, then, can we explain this apparent shift away from the continuous at-sea deterrent? Perhaps it has something to do with the comments of the leader of the SNP who, in talking about coalition, said that Labour would

“have to think again about putting a new generation of Trident nuclear weapons on the River Clyde.”

The public and those whose jobs depend on this programme have a right to know whether the Labour party would be prepared to trade our security if that were the price of power, and I offer the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) the opportunity to make that clear.

[John Woodcock]

I think that the Defence Secretary used wise words when, at the beginning of his speech, he said that we should not use this issue to play short-term politics. Let me gently warn him. We—he and I, and his party and mine—have worked constructively on this issue during difficult times in recent years. I hope that when the shadow Defence Secretary speaks, the right hon. Gentleman will take it from him—if he will not take it from me—that we remain absolutely committed to the statement that he read out. We remain absolutely committed to an independent minimum credible strategic deterrent delivered by means of the submarine programme that we started in government and will finish. A least-cost deterrent is, to our mind, exactly the same as a minimum deterrent. If the Defence Secretary wants to spend more than least costs, he should say so now.

[Michael Fallon]

What I am seeking, and what I have still not heard, is a recommitment to a continuous at-sea deterrent, but those words seem to have slipped out of Labour’s position. I hope that, when we hear from the hon. Member for Gedling—

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[Dame Joan Ruddock]

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman does not know his history. There have been hundreds of wars since that time and hundreds of thousands of people have died. Many of the wars were proxy wars between the superpowers, so his argument is completely invalid. If he argues that deterrence is so wonderful because the weapons are never used, then he has to ask: why have them at all? Let us get rid of them rather than posture and spend vast fortunes and create a situation in which, at the very least, accidents and misjudgments could happen. The point about luck is that eventually it runs out, and that could happen.

It is instructive to inquire how other countries and institutions view the nuclear weapon states. I had an opportunity to find that out last December when I attended a conference organised by the Austrian Government on the humanitarian effects of the use of nuclear weapons, to which the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) has already referred. Building on two previous meetings hosted by Norway and Mexico, this conference was attended by representatives of no fewer than 157 Governments. Most telling were the contributions of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, the bodies on which the whole world depends, regardless of politics, in cases of natural disaster. Let me quote from their statement:

“Even though only a few states currently possess nuclear weapons, they are a concern to all states…They can only bring us to a catastrophic and irreversible scenario that no one wishes and to which no one can respond in any meaningful way.”

Their statement continues:

“All other weapons of mass destruction, namely chemical and biological weapons, have been banned. Nuclear weapons—which have far worse consequences than those weapons—must now be specifically prohibited and eliminated as a matter of urgency.”

I do not think that there is anyone who could not respect a statement from the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.

[John Woodcock]

rose—

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

I am just about to finish.

After the conference, the Austrian Government issued a pledge in which they promised

“to identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition…of nuclear weapons”.

About 40 countries have already signified their support for progressing towards an international treaty that could ban all nuclear weapons.

The renewal of Trident flies in the face of such international action and it must not be allowed to do so. The real threats to this country are cyber-warfare, terrorism, climate change and pandemics. We need all the resources we can muster to confront these threats and we cannot afford to squander billions of pounds on a weapons system that by general consent can never be used.

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[Sir Nick Harvey]

I am going to make some progress and I will take another intervention in a little while.

Our defences have seen round after round of cuts as the financial situation has deteriorated, and later this year we face the gloomy prospect of the whole thing happening all over again. Whatever the outcome of the election, there will be a strategic defence and security review this summer and a comprehensive spending review this autumn.

The Secretary of State dismissed the cost figures offered by the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who opened the debate for the SNP, but I readily recognise those figures. It is a fact that if we go ahead and build four submarines, they will cost us between £25 billion and £30 billion. It is a fact that running the nuclear deterrent currently costs us £2.9 billion a year, and if we do that for another 30 or 40 years the cost will multiply. Whatever the outcome, at some point we will have to decommission it all at the end, so I would have thought that £100 billion is the very least it would cost. I would take a private guess that the quantum would in fact be well in excess of that figure, but I certainly recognise it as a starting point.

[John Woodcock]

On the basic maths, if the figure of £2.9 billion is right and, as CND’s own estimates say, the £100 billion figure is stretched over the whole lifetime of 50-plus years, could the hon. Gentleman tell me what is £2.9 billion times 50?

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I was taking the lifetime of the submarines as being more like 25 to 30 years. If we operate them for 25 years at almost £3 billion, that would take us into the realms of £75 billion plus the building and decommissioning costs, which would certainly take us over £100 billion very quickly indeed. I would have thought that, in reality, it will cost a great deal more than that.

We know that the national deficit remains a serious problem and we do not hear from any of the political parties—mine or anybody else’s—that defence will be insulated or protected from a tough comprehensive spending review later this year. If defence were to face another cut comparable to that which it took in 2010, which seems entirely possible, the proportion of our gross domestic product that we spend on defence, which is already destined to go below 2% next year, will make rapid headway down towards 1.5%.

We know, however, that on the table for discussion in this summer’s SDSR is a whole series of big procurement projects. The two new aircraft carriers are due to have joint strike fighter craft flying off them—we do not know how much their unit cost will be or how many of them we will be able to afford. The Type 26 frigate is due to be built in the next few years, but it is very difficult to know how much that will cost. We need more helicopters and more intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance assets. We need another generation of remotely piloted aircraft. The existing amphibious shipping is due to become redundant in the latter part of this decade and will need replacing if we are going to sustain that capability. The Army’s vehicle crisis remains unresolved after the collapse of most of the future rapid effect system programme.

All those things will be on the table and wrestled over in agony this summer. In addition, paper exercises are already being done looking at what an Army of just 60,000 would look like, because of the financial crunch that the Department will face. Yet, for some reason, keeping a nuclear deterrent going at the level we thought necessary at the height of the cold war in 1980 gets an automatic bye and is assumed to be beyond debate. Nobody even wants to put it on the table and debate it alongside those other things that are there to mitigate the dangers that our own security assessment said in 2010 are first-league threats that we face here and now.

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[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a treat to follow the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), and the House should take a moment to appreciate his tenacity. This is a man who at the last election spearheaded his party’s drive not to have deterrent successor submarines at all, but to have an entirely new form—a mini-deterrent, with adapted Astute submarines and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The Liberal Democrats were so sure of that policy that they put it before the electorate. It was not successful, but they retained it. As Minister, the hon. Gentleman was so determined that he persuaded the Government to fund the Trident alternatives review. That review took 18 months or two years to examine that option exhaustively, finally to conclude what we had been saying all along, which is that the policy was complete nonsense and would cost even more than the current system and be far less efficient.

The hon. Gentleman is not deterred by that. In the manner of a child jumping from sandcastle to sandcastle as the tide comes in, he seeks to find new ways to differentiate himself from the Opposition while never saying the words, after his exhaustive speech, that he is a unilateralist and his party is a unilateralist party. There is an absurdity—I think I have it right—to having not a part-time deterrent, but a no-time, or IKEA, deterrent that he could put together at some point. IKEA furniture can be difficult to assemble, but it does not take the months or years that his proposal would take. In the meantime, would we put glass in the submarines so they can become public viewing vessels? Could they carry grain, so that they could become underwater famine relief vessels, which is one of the more famous suggestions from the unilateralist CND members in my constituency? What is it? Tell the House, or is he going to leave this policy until the election to reveal it?

[Mr MacNeil]

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that famine relief vessels are a crazy idea?

[John Woodcock]

Goodness! If the hon. Gentleman wants to tell me that firing grain out of the torpedo tubes of the successor to Vanguard-class submarines is an effective use of public money, then he should go ahead. I will come on to his policy in a little while, if he does not mind.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I am greatly enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech. Coming back to the real world, is it not the case that the need to have a continuous at-sea deterrent follows directly from the fact that we have a minimum strategic deterrent? We only have four submarines. At any one time only one or two of them can use or fire their missiles—they use them all the time to deter—but the fact is that if we did not have one continuously at sea, a surprise attack would wipe out the whole capacity.

[John Woodcock]

That is exactly right, which is why a part-time deterrent is no real deterrent at all. The point of having submarines that are continuously at sea means that they are, in effect, completely invulnerable. If, in a future nightmare scenario, the UK was seriously threatened by a nuclear attack, any potential nuclear adversary would know that they could not fire without being fired on. Even if they flattened the UK, they would always face the counter-strike. That is why it is a genuine deterrent and makes a nuclear attack less likely.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Was my hon. Friend not surprised to hear the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) say that his strategy is to try to acquire a nuclear weapon if it turned out we might need one? If someone fired on us it would be pointless responding by then. Potential adversaries of Britain would know that if they fired at a Liberal Democrat Government our response would be too late.

[John Woodcock]

Exactly. The fact is that the hon. Gentleman does not believe it. He and his party should come clean that they are unilateralists and stop this charade of ever-new inventive fantastical solutions.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[John Woodcock]

I will give way, but then I really want to take up less time than others have done.

[Mrs Moon]

Does my hon. Friend think that the world is a safer place since 1980? North Korea and Russia have increased their arsenals, Pakistan’s arsenal has grown exponentially and Iran is trying to develop a nuclear capability. Are we actually safer since 1980?

[John Woodcock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The global situation is profoundly unstable. Whether or not there is a nuclear adversary precisely at this moment, we simply cannot say what will be the case in the next 20, 30 or 40 years. That is the decision we are making now: what threats we will face while other countries are increasing, rather than decreasing, their arsenals.

Labour is proud of its record on non-proliferation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) was the Labour Foreign Secretary who committed the UK to a “global zero”—a world completely free from nuclear weapons. Britain was the first nuclear state in the world to sign up, before President Obama, before Russia—although it has clearly reneged on what it said—and, to the best of my knowledge, before either of the parties who have proposed the motion. They were busy thinking small, as is their wont. They were telling Scots that the answer to this issue was to expel nuclear submarines a couple of hundred miles south of the border—they are not coming to Barrow, by the way. They did that while having the cheek—I am not sure whether this is parliamentary language or not, Madam Deputy Speaker—to have the unbridled hypocrisy to say that nuclear weapons were grotesque and inhuman, but that they wished an independent Scotland to remain part of the specifically nuclear alliance of NATO.

[Crispin Blunt]

I realise that, as the hon. Gentleman represents Barrow and Furness, he might have a slightly different answer to this question from other hon. Members, but at what point and at what cost does this weapon system cease to be a proper value-for-money decision for the United Kingdom? How much of the defence budget does it need to take before he would say, “Actually, we are better off investing in other weapon systems that are much, much more likely to be used”? What would his number be?

[John Woodcock]

I will come on to figures later; I will make some progress first.

We will not insult people by saying that Trident is effectively fine as long as it is not coloured tartan. We are a party whose ambition is big. We have acted by reducing stockpiles and reducing to a single nuclear platform the minimum credible independent deterrent that it is responsible to maintain while others hold a threat that one day could be used to blackmail the United Kingdom. We led the world on “global zero” and we will lead again in government. Britain is an outward-looking country that shoulders its responsibilities. It will make genuine progress through multilateral negotiation, not futile unilateral gestures.

Labour is not a unilateralist party. I was at a CND “ban the bomb” demonstration at RAF Molesworth. I think it was in 1984 and I was aged five. If my mum will forgive me, I appreciate the fruit gums she gave me on that day but we are not going back to those days—we have moved on as a party. I listened carefully to my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), who has had to leave for a constituency engagement, but I was left questioning her opening statement. She called herself a multilateralist, but scrapping the programme to replace the ageing Vanguard-class deterrent submarines is tantamount to unilateral disarmament—not today, but a decade or so hence, once the Vanguard-class submarines are no longer seaworthy. As a result of the delays in bringing their successor into service, they are now projected to be the longest-serving submarines in the history of the Royal Navy, but they cannot go on for ever. At that point, we would lose our nuclear capability for ever, yet we cannot possibly know what threats we will face in decades hence. Not only would it put our security at risk, but for any genuine multilateralist, it would be a missed opportunity to encourage other countries and bind them into a deal that makes genuine progress across the world.

The construction taking place in my constituency, and in all parts of the UK, is among the most highly skilled, cutting-edge engineering in the world. We cannot just put these submarines on hold and then pick them up when they might come in handy some years down the track. While a “global zero” remains beyond the horizon, we will finish the programme of renewal that we started in government but which this Administration have delayed to the point that there is precious little contingency left.

The investment announced is significant, but the £100 billion is highly flimsy at best. We do not accept the figure, but—imagining that we did—let me put it into the context of overall UK Government spending, on current levels, over those 50-plus years, a time period that never makes it on to CND posters. According to my office’s estimate, all things being equal, Government spending over those 50 years will be £35,700 billion, which I am told is £3.7 quadrillion—not a number I have used before. Within that, pensions would account for £7,160 billion, and health for £6,475 billion—I used to work for my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), but not even he would use such figures. Education would account for £4,510 billion, and conventional defence for £2,115 billion. Over that period, the £100 billion figure does not seem quite the show-stopper unilateralists would have us believe.

[Crispin Blunt]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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[John Woodcock]

I will not. I have given way once, and I want others to speak.

With money so tight, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) understandably ordered his defence team to re-examine the case for renewal and the most cost-effective way of maintaining the minimum credible deterrent, to which we have always been committed, and it concluded that the submarine- based, strategic, continuously at-sea system remained overwhelmingly the most appropriate system for the UK, and that the most cost-effective way to deliver it was to continue with the successor submarine-building programme, which we began in government and will be voted on in the next Parliament.

It is for the nationalists to explain why they are seeking to prioritise unilateral disarmament by making it, as far as I understand it, their one red line in any future coalition talks—they would prioritise it over all the pressing issues of health, jobs, education and the economy that matter to the people of Scotland and Wales. It is also for them to say how their stance fits with their desire to remain a member of NATO. But Labour’s view is settled. The Leader of the Opposition will never accept an irresponsible deal that trades the nuclear security of future generations in a deeply uncertain world for nationalist support to enter Downing street. We will carry on campaigning for a Labour majority. Plaid Cymru and the SNP can dream on.