US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement

Angus Robertson Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Sir Roger, to serve under your chairmanship. The debate was called for jointly by me and the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), who will speak after me. I am grateful to him for supporting the application to the Backbench Business Committee for today’s debate. For the record, I should explain that he and I hold a slightly different view on the security of the world that has been brought about the presence of nuclear weapons. We have debated this in town and village halls up and down the country on many occasions. No doubt we will continue so to do. I am grateful to him for being prepared to speak, and he is doing so in the spirit of Parliament.

I want to put on the record my thanks to Ben Folley, parliamentary officer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for the huge amount of work he has done in preparing information, and to Dr David Lowry, who works for my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) and who is a renowned expert on these issues.

My first question is: why do we have to debate something as fundamental as a mutual defence agreement with the United States in time allocated by the Backbench Business Committee? The answer is that Governments of all hues—this applies to my party, as well as the coalition Government and previous Conservative Governments—have been reluctant to have parliamentary debates on this subject. Indeed, this is the 20th anniversary of the debate on the Consolidated Fund held in 1994, which was started by Alan Simpson, then a Member, at 1.56 am on 15 December. Only two other Members took part at that time of the morning, so it was hardly parliamentary scrutiny.

I welcome this debate, but there cannot be a vote because it is an Adjournment debate. However, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has tabled a motion, supported by me and others, which could lead to a parliamentary vote on the mutual defence agreement. I hope that it will.

It is interesting that parliamentary scrutiny of the mutual defence agreement and nuclear weapons has been in short supply going back to the end of the second world war. The National Archives in Kew has a document, “Extracts from a memorandum on the Atomic Bomb from Prime Minister Clement Attlee, 28th August 1945”, which states:

“The only course which seems to me to be feasible and to offer a reasonable hope of staving off imminent disaster for the world is joint action by the USA, UK and Russia based upon stark reality. We should declare that this invention has made it essential to end wars. The New World Order must start now.

All nations must give up their dreams of realising some historic expansion at the expense of their neighbours. They must look to a peaceful future instead of to a warlike past. This sort of thing has in the past been considered a utopian dream. It has become today the essential condition of the survival of civilisation and possibly of life on this plant.”

That was Prime Minister Attlee’s view in August 1945, just after the first nuclear weapons had been exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Seven years later, there was an explosion in Australia by Britain when its first H-bomb was detonated. There was an interesting programme last night on al-Jazeera that showed the return of lands to the indigenous people who were driven off them because of those nuclear tests. The nuclear test veterans are still with us, and are still suffering as a result of the tests.

The then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made a statement to the House of Commons on the detonation of that weapon on 3 October 1952. He explained that the temperature at the centre of it was nearly 1 million degrees and the damage it caused, and said that the Government were grateful to the Australian Government for allowing the test. He concluded:

“All those concerned in the production of the first British atomic bomb are to be warmly congratulated on the successful outcome of an historic episode and I should no doubt pay my compliments to the Leader of the Opposition and the party opposite for initiating it.”—[Official Report, 23 October 1952; Vol. 505, c. 1269.]

That was the same Clement Attlee. I am a great admirer of Clement Attlee’s domestic record, but not of a large part of his international record. During questions, Samuel Silverman asked the Prime Minister to explain

“the total cost of this experimental explosion, and will he bear in mind that to some of us it is no comfort at all to realise that both major parties in the State are equally responsible for this colossal folly?”

The Prime Minister said that everyone was equally responsible:

“Even if one sits below the Gangway, one does not escape the responsibility.”

Silverman then asked:

“What about the cost?”

Prime Minister Churchill—this is fascinating—then said:

“As to the cost, I have said before, as an old Parliamentarian, that I was rather astonished that well over £100 million should be disbursed without Parliament being made aware of it. I was a bit astonished. However, there is the story, and we now have a result which on the whole, I think, will be beneficial to public safety. As for the future, I think we must be guided by the precedents established under the last régime as to detailed accounts and the way in which the expenditure is recorded.”—[Official Report, 23 October 1952; Vol. 505, c. 1271.]

It is astonishing that, with all the austerity at the end of the second world war, the then Prime Minister managed to spend £100 million of public money without telling Parliament, and apparently without discussing it with his Cabinet, which resulted in the entirely secret development of a British nuclear weapon, the first of which was exploded in 1952. We still had for some time the pretence that Britain had an independent nuclear deterrent.

[Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman, and the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) on the other side of the Chamber, for helping to secure this debate through the Backbench Business Committee. Does the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) agree that it is unacceptable for a UK Government of any party to wish to spend £100 billion on through-life costs for Trident renewal, and to do so in a way that is not open and transparent, maintaining the historical tradition of being secretive, and not being prepared to face the consequences of their decisions? It seems that the UK Government will not even turn up at the international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons in Vienna in December. Does he agree on both those counts that UK Governments of all political persuasions have acted totally unacceptably?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I agree with his points. The secrecy surrounding anything to do with nuclear weapons is completely unacceptable. The fact that the British Parliament has barely debated the mutual defence agreement—I will come to that in a moment—since its existence is serious. The huge expenditure on Trident, at £100 billion, is enormous by any stretch of the imagination. It is my belief—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—that the British Government have no intention of attending the international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons in Vienna at the beginning of December. I hope I am wrong about that, and I hope that they will attend, because it would simply not be right not to attend.

On scrutiny, the US is a major military and industrial power; that is obvious. It is a very wealthy country—that is equally obvious. The President must send a message to Congress to ask it to approve and renew the amended treaty, and it must debate, vote on and approve it. We have no such transparency in the British Parliament. The Prime Minister or any other Minister still has the ability to use the royal prerogative to override Parliament in this respect, and to approve the treaty, if that is what they want to do. That is why I was so determined that we should have this debate and why I have raised the issue on so many occasions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Angus Robertson]

Has the hon. Gentleman any idea why our colleagues in the United States of America deem it unacceptable to conduct such tests there, but somehow we find it acceptable that they should happen here in the UK?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I have many criticisms of the USA, but one thing that I find interesting and admire to some extent is the relative openness of its parliamentary system, compared with ours, and the ability of individual Members of Congress and the Senate to get legislation through. Indeed, legislation prevents such tests from happening in the USA. That is not the case in this country.

[Angus Robertson]

Just for the record, for people who might be watching this debate and who have not been following the proceedings in the United States, what were the reasons why American law makers opposed such tests being conducted in the United States? I ask that just so that we can understand on what basis UK Governments of both political persuasions have found it acceptable for that happen in the UK.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Nuclear weapons have been tested in the USA. They were tested there in 1945, towards the end of the second world war. I am thinking of the Manhattan project. There was the Nevada test range. Since then, there has also been considerable testing, including underground testing, and there are therefore deeply polluted and damaged lands in the west of the USA in particular, just as much as there are deeply polluted and damaged places in the Pacific such as the Marshall Islands or, indeed, in Australia.

There has not been any nuclear testing in the UK itself. We have always done that somewhere else and polluted somebody else’s environment rather than our own. I suspect that the motives behind the legislation that the hon. Gentleman refers to in the USA come from concerns about the environment and health of people, particularly in the western parts of the USA. Indeed, talking to the Western Shoshone people, one can only admire how they have stoically campaigned against nuclear weapons when they have suffered so much because of that.

The Austrian Government have invited every nation in the world to come to Vienna in December to take part in a conference on the humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons. This will be the third conference. The first was held in Oslo; it was hosted by the Norwegian Government. The second was held in Mexico, hosted by its Government. As I said, the third will be hosted by Austria. The last conference was attended by 135 nations, and 155 nations have now signed up to this conference. The Government of New Zealand, who are iconic in giving up nuclear weapons and devices, have headed up an invitation from those 155. Can we really be so discourteous to those 155 countries as to say, “We do not want to come.?

[Angus Robertson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. He mentioned the fact that the first of those conferences was hosted by the Government of Norway, a member of NATO that now provides the Secretary-General of NATO. Norway, no doubt, will be attending the conference together with other NATO member states and more than 100 other countries. Given the commitment of other NATO countries, other allies and other friends, if they think it is important to turn up at that meeting, it would be much more than a discourtesy if we did not. Why are the UK Government not prepared to join the majority of other states that have taken their responsibilities seriously in understanding the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The Government must answer for themselves, if they have decided definitely not to go to the conference. It would be discourteous not to attend, but the answer I received from the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) during Foreign Office questions a couple of weeks ago indicated that he thought the conference was one-sided. Yes, it is a one-sided conference. It will consider the humanitarian effects of what nuclear explosions do, and what they have done in the past. I met the Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands in New York at the NPT review conference in May. He witnessed a nuclear explosion as a child, and his community has been devastated by successive testing. The community is now taking out an International Court of Justice action against the nuclear weapons states, Britain included, because of the damage that has been done to the community and the islands. Surely, if supporters of nuclear weapons are so confident that those weapons are safe, reliable, usable and so on, they will not be afraid to attend a conference to discuss the humanitarian effects of those weapons on the environment, pollution and the welfare of the entire planet. I quote from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons:

“The UK is badly out of step with the majority of countries in the world. As one of the few countries with nuclear weapons, the UK has a special responsibility to understand the risks and consequences of its own weapons. By refusing to participate in the conferences on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons held by the governments of Norway and Mexico, the UK gave the impression that it doesn’t care about the catastrophic effects its weapons could have on environment, climate, health, social order, human development and global economy.”

I could not put it better myself, and few others could.

We are debating the MDA at last, and I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee and to the House for giving us the opportunity to do so. I hope that there will be an opportunity to debate and vote on the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion and others that calls for the rejection of the MDA because of its secrecy, because of its transfer of technology of weapons of mass destruction between two jurisdictions and because it will be used as a basis for the renewal of the Trident system. I believe that Parliament will have to vote on the renewal of Trident in 2016, and that will commit us to expending £100 billion on yet another generation of weapons of mass destruction. There has to be a different way to run the world. There has to be a different way to use our technology, resources and skills rather than the highly secretive world of nuclear weapons. The MDA represents all that is wrong about the nuclear relationship between Britain and the USA. That is why I have raised the subject today, and I hope that we can promote a serious public debate about nuclear weapons and their safety.