Trident Renewal

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

There are of course current threats to this country from ISIL and the jihadists, as, indeed, there are from Russia’s behaviour over the past year or so, but we must also plan for future threats to this country, including nuclear threats. Some may well argue, like the hon. Gentleman, that in the face of terrorism and the other immediate threats that we have seen over the past year, a nuclear deterrent is somehow less relevant. That is an argument, but we have never suggested that those other threats should or can be countered by the nuclear deterrent. We are clear that the nuclear deterrent is the only assured way to deter nuclear threats.

Others have suggested that we should move away from continuous patrols and have a part-time deterrent, as if our enemies did not work the full week, but there is simply no alternative to a continuous at-sea deterrent that can provide the same level of protection and the ability to deter an aggressor. We know that because successive Governments have looked at the different options for delivering a deterrent capability. Most recently, the Trident alternatives review in 2013 demonstrated that no alternative system is as capable or cost-effective as a Trident-based deterrent. It also found:

“None of these alternative systems and postures offers the same degree of resilience as the current posture of Continuous at Sea Deterrence, nor could they guarantee a prompt response in all circumstances.”

All the previous studies have also shown that four submarines are required to maintain the continuous posture.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I wanted to intervene earlier, at the end of my right hon. Friend’s arguments about the nature of the gamble that one would be taking with the future security of the United Kingdom by not having a nuclear weapons system. Is not the rather difficult truth that we are making a series of risk assessments and gambles about what we spend on defence and the particular type of defence we buy? While it is funded from the defence budget, Trident comes at the expense of a larger Army, Navy and Air Force, so it is all part of a wider risk assessment, not, as the Secretary of State has suggested, an absolute. If there was no money left for anything except Trident, is that really the decision that we would take?

[Michael Fallon]

My hon. Friend is of course right to say that we must assess future risks and the capabilities that we will have to deal with them. All I can say to him is that every successive Government who have looked at the future threat have, in the end, decided to continue to renew our continuous at-sea deterrent. In a world that is becoming more dangerous, there are no alternatives that offer the level of protection and security that this country needs.

Let me be clear, particularly to the Scottish National party, about what we are planning to replace and when. Subject to a maingate decision in 2016, we are planning to replace the current Vanguard submarines—not the Trident missile or the warheads. We are planning to replace the submarines in the late 2020s, by which time our Vanguard submarines will be 35 years old.

--- Later in debate ---

[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?

--- Later in debate ---

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the part-polemic by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). He was unable to answer a question put to him when he was challenged by Opposition Front Benchers about the extent to which his party, as the head of an independent Scotland, would be prepared to shelter under the American nuclear alliance. That is an important question that his party has to answer.

I say that from the perspective of someone who intends to vote with the hon. Gentleman this evening. It is right that there should be a proper debate about this, and I therefore welcome the debate that his party colleagues have introduced. We should have a cool, calm consideration of the merits of the Trident weapons system. Over the course of a decade, I have been increasingly uncomfortable about the prospect of renewing this weapons system. It is a system, and we are renewing the submarines that make up part of it. Some people have said that the motion is therefore technically in error, but without the submarines the system is pointless and without the missiles it is pointless. That is what the motion means and it is on that basis that I support it. Let me explain why.

The clinching argument for me—although I also want to refer to lots of other issues—is the opportunity cost of spending, let us say, £100 billion on renewing the weapons system over its lifetime. I am wearing the regimental tie of the Light Dragoons and want to make it clear that I spent a long time in defence, professionally and then subsequently as a special adviser in the Ministry of Defence and then in the Foreign Office. I remember trying to plan a scenario, in a political sense, for the circumstances in which the United Kingdom would decide to use nuclear weapons or weapons of similar destructive power, but, frankly, I found it impossible to find such a scenario. I think that that is still the case, and the deterrent effect of that uncertainty has been discussed.

Thirty years on from the decision taken in the 1980s to acquire the Trident system, things have changed significantly and, given the opportunity cost of acquiring the system, I believe that the decision to spend £100 billion should be altered. This weapons system is of much less practical utility than it used to be in deterrence terms and, given the cost-benefit analysis, the time has come to say that this is a business that the United Kingdom should probably get out of. As a nation, given the other potential demands on our defence budget, we can no longer justify the expense.

I listened carefully to the arguments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin)—he made an extremely good speech—and they need to be addressed. First, if we buy this system, will it come at the expense of other parts of the defence budget? My view is that it will. My hon. Friend maintained that if the system is not bought, the Treasury will not give the Ministry of Defence the money. However, we have just made a significant political commitment to maintain defence expenditure at 2% of GDP.

[Mr Jenkin]

Have we?

[Crispin Blunt]

It was a political commitment made by the leaders of NATO at a summit hosted by the United Kingdom, so I believe we have made that commitment. The Government have not made it explicit and the Prime Minister will not do so before the general election, because we have to address serious budget issues and he is, rightly, giving himself room for manoeuvre. Everyone present knows that defence expenditure is already at historically low levels in terms of its share of national wealth. We are making economies in defence and in my view our defence posture is, frankly, incoherent, because we can no longer afford a coherent defence policy for the United Kingdom owing to the amount of resources we are devoting to it.

That is an issue for another debate, but it illustrates the point about the cost of acquiring this system. In the 1980s it cost between 2.5% and 3% of the total defence budget. The cost of renewing the system will be at about the same level of real expenditure, which means that it will cost about 6% of the defence budget. In private conversations with colleagues who share the same background as me, when I ask them whether they would rather have that money spent on the field army or on acquiring this weapons system, their answer is clear: they would rather have it spent on actual deployable defence—soldiers, sailors, airmen and the equipment deployed with them on operations—or even on the deterrence that a decent set of conventional armed forces provides. The names of some of the distinguished former Chiefs of the Defence Staff or those in other roles who have questioned the value for money of taking such a sum out of the defence budget have already been paraded.

I would argue very strongly to the Defence Secretary that if we are committed to this system, we should understand that it is a political weapons system, and that it is of very doubtful military utility. I do not entirely buy the deterrence argument, but that is a qualified position, because all these things are matters of judgment. If we do buy the argument, however, that should not come at the expense of a coherent defence programme. If we need 2% of GDP to provide a coherent conventional defence programme, we should buy this political weapons system not out of that budget, but from a separate source of funding.

In an intervention on the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), I asked just how much he would spend on acquiring this weapons system. He represents Barrow, where the submarines will be made, so I understand that his view of their value is rather different from that of other Members. However, we must answer this question, which we have not properly addressed: at what point does the expense become unaffordable for the United Kingdom?

I am perfectly content to continue to shelter under the American nuclear umbrella. I accept that the decision matrix would be profoundly different if the United States of America was not a rock-solid ally, the Atlantic alliance was not extremely important to the Americans or we could not place the same degree of reliability on their support as we now do. If we had good reason to believe that the United States was not going to be intimately tied into the defence of ourselves and Europe, the decision would be different. I happen to believe, however, that our interests are so closely intertwined, as they have been in all sorts of ways, that we can continue to rely on that alliance.

Frankly, I am not sure that the Americans place very much value on a separate source of nuclear deterrence decision making in London. I think that they would prefer us to bring such resources to the table in the form of deployable conventional forces. The United States Government will not of course take a public view that embarrasses the UK Government, but if we scratched them, we would find that they would rather we had more effective conventional forces.

I do not buy the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex that we would lose the money from the defence budget altogether and not be able to spend it on anything else. However, even if the money was lost, it would have value: £100 billion off the debt or spent on other parts of the public service would be valuable.

I therefore ask: what are we buying with the system? There should be a debate about whether we are buying security or, given the laws of unintended consequences, insecurity. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire said that he thought we were buying status for our leaders so that they can parade themselves appropriately at conferences. I do not buy that argument—our leaders are perfectly capable of thinking in hard terms about what hard security is affordable—but I am concerned about the political background to this discussion, and about whether we can have a sensible debate on the cost-benefit analysis of acquiring this system.

The problem is the inheritance of the politics of the 1980s. When the decision was made to acquire the Vanguard and Trident system, the then Labour Opposition came out against it in 1983 as part of the “longest suicide note in history” that they presented to the United Kingdom electorate. I think that that policy was wrong and that at the time, because of the cold war, it was right to renew the deterrent. The people of the United Kingdom took the same view in the general election, as they did about the rest of the basket of promises that Michael Foot and his colleagues presented to the country, and they gave that policy, very properly, an extremely large raspberry and possibly the biggest Conservative majority in the history of Parliament—I am sure I will be corrected if that is wrong.

The scarring effect of that event, and the fact that there might be some proper debate, particularly on the Opposition Benches, means that dissent is suppressed. I am proud to stand here as a Conservative and question the efficacy of the decision under discussion, particularly in terms of its opportunity cost. It may be that I have discounted my future career prospects to such an extent that I feel free to make these points, but for the benefit of the Government Whip who is making a note, I say that this is where my judgment lies currently, but it would not prevent me from exercising collective responsibility to support the decision as part of any future Administration. [Laughter.] We should be able to have this debate and ask questions. How much money would we be prepared to spend on this system if its cost was not going to be 6% of the defence budget? What about if it was 10% or 20% of the defence budget? At what point does it cease to be sensible to invest in this system?

Many Members support deterrence in principle, or at least are not against the possession of weapons of this destructive power in principle—that is a perfectly proper position to take, although I do not share it because to a degree I buy the arguments that I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s about the principle of a defence. I agree that during the cold war these weapons ensured that the world did not elide into direct hot war engagements that had the ability to escalate into catastrophe. The potential for catastrophe at the root of deterrence in a cold war, bipolar world kept us safe, but we are now in a different world and different calculations must be made.

My view is that for the United Kingdom, 6% of the defence budget is not justifiable, and that also relates to my view of Britain’s place in the world. Unlike most of my colleagues, I would be prepared to put our permanent seat on the Security Council up for negotiation and debate in a reform of the UN Security Council, to try to make that institution more effective. I think it is difficult to justify a British veto on the UN Security Council, and because it is so difficult to justify, the veto is hardly ever used by the United Kingdom. We must also think about Britain’s role in the world, and I do not think that we have properly had the debate about exactly what we can bring to the councils of the world, and what Britain’s position in the world should be.

We will be much better equipped to defend our interests if we are a wealthy, successful, entrepreneurial and trading nation that looks out to the entire world, and I am not sure that landing us with a weapons system that we are never going to use is a sensible use of resources, and it therefore might become a burden—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am loth to interrupt the hon. Gentleman. He is making an extremely interesting speech, which is being listened to with respect. He said that the debate needed to happen and I just want, very politely, to make the point that six other hon. Members, who will have a lot less time than the hon. Gentleman, are waiting to speak. Therefore, I feel confident in predicting that his last sentence is coming.

[Crispin Blunt]

I am very grateful, Mr Speaker. I looked around to see who was standing and got to a different number, so I am immensely grateful and will conclude my arguments.

I had taken the view of the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) that there should be an alternative way of buying this kind of deterrence, or at least some kind of deterrence, in a cheaper way. I now accept that the alternatives review has answered that question, and has at least made the decision matrix around this much clearer. I do not think it is now possible, on the basis of that work, for us to buy a deterrent in a different way.

However, I gently point out to those who think that by renewing these weapons we are buying an invulnerable system, that I do not think we are. I think the nature of surveillance under the sea will make the future generation of submarines much more discoverable than present science suggests, and the question of Scottish independence will come around again in the lifetime of this weapons system. Had we had to move this weapons system from an independent Scotland, the cost of making a base for it in Plymouth or elsewhere would have been eye-watering. All those uncertainties need to be factored in. On that basis, and on the opportunity cost, I will with deep regret be voting against most of my colleagues this evening.