Sunday 10 June 2012

Policy for Peace

More than rumour has it that Alex Salmond is about to announce a climbdown from his party’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Anyone suggesting that it would remain SNP policy because only the Party Conference could remove it as such needs to ask the Lib Dems about that sort of thing.

Far from representing national pride or independence, our nuclear weapons programme has only ever represented the wholesale subjugation of Britain’s defence capability to a foreign power. That power maintains no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, almost none of which have nuclear weapons.

Like radiological, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are morally repugnant simply in themselves. They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries while actually governing no state. Where would any such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?

Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to “play with the big boys”, thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless. It is high time for Britain to grow up. Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.

Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are those therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7th July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11th September 2001 were against the country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The only “nuclear power” in the Middle East is Israel. Is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East? It is mind-boggling to hear people go on about Iran, whose President is in any case many years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and in any case only wants one, if he does, to use against the only Middle Eastern country that already has them. What does any of this have to do with us?

Numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the Fifties and Sixties. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO. Enoch Powell denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle.

The rural populist John G Diefenbaker, who opposed official bilingualism in Canada’s English-speaking provinces, and who campaigned for his flag to remain the Canadian Red Ensign with the Union Flag in its corner, also kept JFK’s nukes off Canadian soil. Ronald Reagan initiated nuclear arms reduction in Europe. James Baker, as Secretary State under George Bush the Elder, secured unilateral nuclear disarmament by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in this area, whereas the Tea Party persons who have just denied him renomination deserve something else entirely.

Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

There could not be bigger and more unwise spending, or a more ineffective example of the “Big State”, than nuclear weapons in general and Trident in particular. Diverting enormous sums of money towards public services, towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, and towards paying off our national debt, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. It is what Disraeli would have done.

As surely as making the case both for the Union and for a specifically English identity. As surely as defending the Royal Mail against what little service the, often foreign-owned, private sector would deign to provide to most of the country. As surely as insisting that the Queen’s Highways not be replaced with toll roads owned by oil-rich foreign states. As surely as resisting any attempt to replace the National Health Service with a patchwork full of holes, owned by Andrew Lansley and his American business partners. As surely as fighting tooth and nail against any scheme to replace Sunday with just another shopping day.

As surely as standing firm against the proposal to replace the historic regiments with some Girl Guide operation within an EU defence “capability” under overall American command. As surely as holding the line against machinations to replace the County Constabularies with a British KGB, or at least to subject them to it. As surely as upholding the State action necessary in order to maintain the work of charities, the work of churches, and a large and thriving middle class. As surely as holding a referendum on continued membership of the EU. As surely as refusing to impose a three-line whip on the compulsion of churches to “marry” same-sex couples. And as surely as challenging the tax privileges of institutions that now entirely embody the theft of this country from the patriotic and historic middle class by the globalist and arriviste megarich.

Aldous Huxley contended that there have been no conservatives since the excoriation of the Landsdowne Letter, a classically Tory document by the man who negotiated the classically Tory Anglo-Japanese Alliance (signed in his house) and the classically Tory Entente Cordiale. That Letter was published in the Daily Telegraph, so how is that newspaper planning to mark its centenary in 2016? According to Huxley, since it and its author were reviled, there have been only “nationalistic radicals of the Right” passing themselves off as conservatives and Tories.

Quite so. But the recent conflagrations have awakened the older tradition. The days of Tories feeling obliged to vote for that Whig and Liberal creature and vehicle, the Conservative Party, are long gone. Gone with the Soviet Union, the only thing that held that party together. Gone with the Soviet Union, the only excuse, and even then not a very good one, for the maintenance of a nuclear “deterrent”.

Some of us have been blogging away for years, and saying for years and years, that the real nuclear deterrent was civil nuclear power. Labour should take up the recent suggestion by Peter Hitchens that the money saved by scrapping Trident be spent instead on nuclear power stations. It recalls Eisenhower’s still-inspiring advocacy of nuclear power as “atoms for peace” 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. For whom would Peter Hitchens then advise his readers to vote?

Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you.

2 comments:

  1. Speaking of Celtic cousins, I see that the Republic of Ireland lost 3-1 to Croatia tonight in the Catholic group. You must be pleased David.

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  2. My friend's little boy is. She's of Croatian parentage, her husband is a Catholic with an Irish surname and is from the Consett area, but he has never, in well over 20 years that I have known him, expressed the slightest consciousness of being Irish. Nor has anyone else I know up in that famous citadel, of whatever generation, no matter how Irish their names.

    In fact once, when I mentioned that my name was Scottish, he said that so was his. I didn't say anything, but it isn't. Entirely typical, in my experience. But Croats are a different matter.

    Still, one would rather have seen victory by a team representing somewhere that the Olympic Torch has toured on the apparently unquestioned basis that it is an integral part of the host country. The most notable thing about that detour is that no one has found it remotely worthy of comment.

    Just as no one has that Mrs Brown's Boys was given a BAFTA as a British programme at a ceremony compèred by a man from County Wicklow who was schooled entirely in Irish. Brendan O'Carroll was also nominated as a British actor, and neither he nor anyone else said a word.

    Things are shifting. And, frankly, we can all see in which direction. Well, look at the alternative. Just wait for the coming Miliband-Balls Government in, therefore, non-austerity Britain. Support for readopting sterling rises drastically among the young and among Sinn Féin supporters.

    Remember the outpouring of outrage over here when Ireland had that spot of footballing bother with the French a couple of years ago? As far as everyone was concerned without a moment's pause, a Home Nation had been wronged by foreigners. Well, of course.

    Now, on topic, please.

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