Trident Renewal

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

In following the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards), it is worth reflecting on how important it is to have these debates. We do not necessarily hear anything new and startling emerge in the arguments put forward, but it is important that the British public—our voters—see that we are having this discussion. If there was one shortcoming in the decision taken at the end of Tony Blair’s reign, it was that it was felt to have been taken in an unseemly rush. It is absolutely right that we should continue to debate this matter until the maingate decision is taken.

The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr remarked that the main decision is going to be taken after the next election. To that extent, this debate is rather otiose. It is not a turning-point debate; it is about political positioning. To some extent, it is rather laughable. I would not usually pick holes in a motion, but this one says that this House believes that Trident should not be renewed. We know what the Scottish and Welsh nationalists mean by the motion, but we are not renewing Trident; we are renewing the submarines. We are not renewing the missiles or the warheads, but simply renewing the submarines. For the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), currently sitting in the place of the SNP leader, to say that a vote against this motion is a vote for “stockpiling” nuclear weapons really is an exaggeration. That does not excuse itself from the mouth of a unilateralist.

There are many points to pick up from the debate. The cost needs to be put in context. The extra cost that has occasioned this debate is a mere—I say a mere—£261 million. That is a tiny, minute part of the defence budget. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, it is merely a pull forward of what will be spent later, and spending it now probably saves money in the long term. Even if one accepted this £100 billion lifetime cost of Trident over, say, 50 years, that would be less than our net contribution to the European Union in each of those years. It would be less than many other costs that we sign away without a breath. I will never forget the day we underwrote all the banks with hundreds of billions of pounds of capital in an extraordinarily under-populated and uncontroversial debate. This is a relatively small decision—less than HS2, as was pointed out.

The right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), who used to represent CND and apparently still does, asked why we should waste this money on weapons that we never use. This is another misconception. These weapons are in use every day. They are deployed and they are ready to fire at a few moments’ notice. They are not targeted on any particular country or city, but they are ready to be deployed in anger on any day of any year at any hour. I echo the Secretary of State’s tribute to the Trident submarine crews and their families and all those who support their operation. It is an immense achievement that we maintain a continuous at-sea deterrent.

The presence of this capability at our disposal in the oceans helps to shape the global security environment. It is not just to keep us safe; it is to keep the world safe. It is to keep all those non-nuclear members of NATO under an umbrella. It is to engage the United States in what happens in Europe. If we gave up our nuclear weapons and France gave up its, which I presume is what is advocated by proponents of the motion, why would the United States be bothered to defend us when we cannot be bothered to defend ourselves? That is what the US would think; in fact, it is what the US already thinks in respect of conventional capability. If we were to take our piece off the board, it would be the final nail in the obligation of the US to defend us in extremis. It is the same question as whether we would pull the trigger to defend a non-NATO country without any nuclear capability, should Russia become aggressive with that country.

[Mr MacNeil]

What is the difference between the hon. Gentleman’s policy and attitude towards this issue and the policy and attitude of people in America who feel that they need to have handguns to protect themselves “for security”?

[Mr Jenkin]

I do not think there is a parallel. The people who own handguns as individuals are not accountable for their behaviour. We have a licensing system in this country that is vigorous, makes people much more accountable and limits the number of such guns in circulation, particularly when it comes to people who might be less accountable. I can understand the hon. Gentleman’s rather trivial point, but it is a rhetorical debating point, so I am not going to spend much time on it.

There is another question that we keep hearing: “Is this really an independent deterrent?” I have spent plenty of time around a deterrent and around people who know about the deterrent, and if the Americans had some secret switch in some bunker in the United States that could disable our deterrent and prevent us from firing it, I think that we would know about it. That switch does not exist. The fact is that once the submarine is at sea, the command and control of the firing of the weapons system is completely autonomous. One of the factors that give us leverage over American policy is that if this country were in trouble, or if Europe were in trouble, America too would be in trouble, because the possibility of a nuclear exchange would bind it inextricably into the conflict. Europe and the United States have many mutual interests, and there are many reasons why we should support each other’s security policies, but, in extremis, we can strengthen that position by means of the capability that we possess.

Another question that we keep being asked is, “Does deterrence work?” There is evidence that it does, and those who argue that deterrence had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war are flying in the face of that evidence. There was an arms race, and the options that were available to the Soviet Union as it sought to solve its internal problems by expanding were contained by deterrence. It lost the arms race because it could not afford to keep up with the cost of the technology that the west could afford.

[Mr MacNeil]

If deterrence worked and mutually assured destruction worked, why did Colonel Petrov not respond in the 1980s when he thought that five missiles were bound for the USSR? If what the hon. Gentleman is saying were true, the world would have been annihilated in the 1980s.

[Mr Jenkin]

We do not expect the people who man the nuclear weapons systems in responsible countries such as ours—I even include Russia in that—to act as automatons; we expect them to use their judgment, and Colonel Petrov used his judgment. I would expect anyone in a position of that kind to use his judgment. As for the idea that we are all living on a knife edge because there will be some hideous nuclear accident at any minute, there is absolutely no evidence of that. The book that was referred to by the right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford, speaking for CND, is full of scare stories, none of which has actually led to any disaster. That is because safety is built into the systems, and those postulated disasters are extremely unlikely to occur.

The point that I make to the hon. Gentleman is the point that I would make to the right hon. Lady. Why does he think war between great powers ended at the same time as nuclear weapons were invented? It is because war between great powers possessing nuclear weapons suddenly became unthinkable. Other wars have occurred, but they have been wars in which the participants have not had nuclear weapons. The reason we live in what is perhaps a safer world is that we live in a world with nuclear weapons. I know that the hon. Gentleman will find that very hard to accept.

[Mr MacNeil]

What has happened since the end of the second world war is that colonial wars have ended. Colonialism has gone and imperialism has gone, and that is why wars between the great powers have gone. There was a change in the mindset of many countries when colonialism went. It had nothing to do with nukes.

[Mr Jenkin]

I hear the hon. Gentleman’s assertion. There was a great competition between two great powers from 1945 until 1990, but it never resulted in an all-out conflict because both sides possessed nuclear weapons. I think that that speaks for itself.

Why must the United Kingdom be the country that carries this responsibility? That is another question that we hear. I am afraid that it is an accident of history. We must because we can, and we must because others cannot or will not. Do we want Germany to become a nuclear power instead of us? Do we want France to be the only nuclear power in Europe? Do we want Italy and Spain to become nuclear powers? No. They do not want to, and we do not want them to. It is better for us to have a limit of two nuclear powers in Europe, and to share the responsibility with the United States. That is the way in which the dice of history have fallen, but it has advantages for us. We are one of the most powerful countries in the world. We project our power and status through the possession of nuclear weapons, and we hold our position on the P5 as a nuclear weapons state. We are, even now, one of the great powers in this world, providing global security for us and our allies, and indeed for so many of the countries that might consider themselves our enemies—that is one of the ironies of the situation—and shaping the global strategic environment in all our interests, not least our own.

Let us deal with another myth: the idea that scrapping Trident would allow a spending bonanza on other public programmes or on defence. There is no evidence to suggest that the Treasury would allow the cancellation of Trident and allow the Ministry of Defence to keep that money to spend on conventional weapons. No amount of expenditure on conventional weapons that we could possibly afford would replace the stabilising and security effects of possessing the nuclear deterrent.

The one really laughable bit of this debate is the Liberal Democrats’ attempt to revive their now totally discredited “Trident Alternatives Review”. Why do we need four submarines? I hear the caveat the Labour party gingerly puts on its commitment to that, but the fourth submarine is so far in the future that it will not affect the spending plans of the next Government or the one after, so the problem is almost academic at this stage. The question is whether or not we build submarines one, two and three—I will settle for that. We have four submarines to ensure the resilience of the system towards the end of its life. If we did not have four, we would by now have suffered an interruption of the continuous at-sea deterrence. If we do not maintain that, we have a part-time deterrent, which is no deterrent; there is no point in a temporary deterrent.

Let us deal with the fantasy that we could create joint-role submarines. The Americans may have them but they have 12 submarines. For them to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence, they can have some submarines doing completely different tasks while some of their nuclear ballistic missile submarines are carrying out the deterrent role. They have a completely different force concept from us, and it would be improper to import it. They do not understand how we can manage continuous at-sea deterrence with just four submarines and they admire the resilience of our system. We should not fiddle with it, or we will disturb its resilience.

People then ask, “Why not have a cheaper or different system?” That argument has all been disposed of, because there is no cheaper or different system of which to avail ourselves, be it submarine-launched cruise missiles, land-based missiles or air-launched weapons. We would require new submarines. There is no submarine that can carry a nuclear-tipped cruise missile. There is no nuclear cruise missile. We would have to develop a new warhead and a new missile to have nuclear-launched cruise missiles. We would need to have a new submarine because the payload of a nuclear cruise missile is so much bigger than a conventional cruise missile. We would need to develop a completely new submarine, which is what we are doing for the Trident system in any case—it is actually the cheapest system available. There is no alternative system. If we were to diversify into a completely new weapons system, it could be argued that we would be in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty because we would not be replacing like with like.

Let us deal with the concept of these different proposals, and the idea that we should abandon the continuous at-sea deterrence and keep our submarines on the Clyde until there is an emergency. Let us imagine that halfway through the Ukraine crisis we had decided to deploy our ballistic missile submarine to a continuous patrol. The cameras would have been out and the families would have known. When a submarine sails, people know about it. The submarine deploys down the Clyde on the surface, so people can take pictures of it—it is not difficult—so the world would have known that we were escalating the crisis. To make ourselves safer we have to escalate the crisis—what an absurd position to put ourselves in. Were there a real crisis at that moment of escalation, our deterrent on the surface, visible by satellite, would itself be vulnerable to attack; we would be inviting a pre-emptive attack in order to prevent us from deploying our deterrent capability.

It is strategic nonsense to move to a part-time deterrent, and the same applies in respect of submarine-launched cruise missiles. A cruise missile is a subsonic weapon, whose launch would be detected and tracked long before it arrived on target. It would be vulnerable then to interception. How many cruise missiles would we need, to be able to provide a credible deterrent? Nobody knows —nobody knows the costs of this, but they would be astronomical. In any case, it is likely that our enemy would launch a ballistic missile, which would arrive on target in our own country within minutes and long before our missile had arrived at its target. Therefore, it is not a deterrent. The same goes for land-based missiles: there is no land-based system available. Where would we put it if we were to have a land-based system? [Interruption.] Incidentally, we would need to develop our own warheads to deploy on any different weapons system, and that cost would have to be factored in.

The “Trident Alternatives Review” has been completely trashed and rubbished. The reason that the option appears to be on the table is not that the Liberal Democrats believe it is viable—I do not believe they do—but that they think it is a bargaining chip to use in the negotiations with one of the two major parties at a time of a hung Parliament if that were to emerge after the general election.

The two main parties are quite near to making it clear to the Liberal Democrats that there is simply no deal. Until that stupid policy is taken off the table, there is no conversation to be had about any future coalition with the Liberal Democrats. That is what should have happened in 2010. I am sorry that it did not, but I am very encouraged by the confidence and determination of the Labour party that continuous at-sea deterrence, will be maintained after the next election. There is a simple reason why that should happen: it is entirely probable, indeed almost certain, that there will be a clear majority in this House for continuous at-sea deterrence and the Trident submarine system—there was a majority last year and in 2007. Even if there is a party in coalition with a caveat, the majority of this House wants to maintain this system and that is the obligation. That is something that we can demonstrate for the public good, without party politics, across the Floor of the House. There is consensus and agreement on this. Sometimes we put our national interests ahead of our own party interests and we get on with the job that we are here to do, which is to govern our country and keep it safe.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Lady makes her point well; I will add no more, other than to thank her for that intervention.

The amendment tabled in my name and those of my hon. Friends seeks to correct the huge error that has been made and to enable a day to be found, with the Electoral Commission taking the lead, so that the referendum can take place on a date on which no other election to a Parliament or Assembly in the United Kingdom is to be held. To that end, it seeks respect and consultation between the UK’s parliamentary and Assembly institutions. I have not prescribed a specific date, but have specified a time frame within which a referendum could take place. That would enable everything to occur and the process to be completed before the next UK election, which was alluded to during the programme motion debate.

My thinking in framing the amendment was to avoid being prescriptive and repeating the Deputy Prime Minister’s error of finding a date and arguing for it, regardless of what else might be happening on that date. My main motivation has been to respect already established processes and elections by finding another day, consensually and with respect for all by all. I do not, however, rule out supporting other amendments through a mechanism of mutual support.

I move the amendment because, although this issue is important—the Committee would not be discussing it if it was not—it is not as important as the range of policy choices to be made in Scotland and the re-election of an SNP Government on 5 May 2011.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I rise to move amendment 4, which was tabled in my name and those of my colleagues and which is associated with amendments 5 and 6.