Trident

Eric Joyce Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Absolutely. If we do not know the cost, if we do not know what the alternatives are and if we do not know the foreign policy considerations surrounding the alternatives, we move into the era—once again—where the Ministry of Defence basically does what it likes and Parliament endorses it at some later stage. So we are moving—sleepwalking, actually—into a massive level of expenditure. Never mind whether people like or dislike, agree with or disagree with, nuclear weapons—is that really a sensible way for this country to go headlong into spending £100 billion?

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend think that, when the Government committed themselves to a review, they must have known what the nature of the review was going to be, so they must also have known at the time that they were never going to make the review public?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Presumably, there were discussions in the MOD about exactly what the terms of the review would be, who would contribute to it and what desk research would be done. The MOD must have also decided, “Well, we’re not going to publish it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what’s in it.” If I were a Liberal Democrat MP—I am not one, I have no intention of being one and I do not think that I ever will be one, so I am talking about a purely hypothetical situation—I would be very angry about that because, having negotiated that review into the coalition agreement, the Liberal Democrats are now being told that they are not even allowed to know what is in it.

Before I give the Minister sufficient time to reply—I am sure that he will be happy to take even more interventions than I have—I have a few questions to put to him. If the current Government are re-elected in 2015, will they provide a parliamentary vote on the Trident main gate? When will the format and timing of the annual update statements be decided, and what is the reason for delaying an announcement on those statements? To their credit, the Government have produced quarterly statements on the situation in Afghanistan, and frequent statements on the situation in the middle east and north Africa. I welcome those statements; they show openness, which is good. Consequently, those of us who take those matters very seriously can question the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Defence on them regularly in Parliament, and we know when those opportunities are coming up. That is what Parliament is for and that is the right way of doing things. The expenditure on Trident is so massive, the decision on Trident is so huge and the implications of Trident are so enormous that we need something more than an annual statement about it to Parliament. We need at least a quarterly statement on Trident from the Secretary of State for Defence.

My two final questions to the Minister concern work at Aldermaston, because it seems to me that there is something very murky going on at Aldermaston—something very murky indeed. A huge amount of money is being spent there and, as I understand it, a lot of preparation is being made there for warhead production. So we need to know what the nature of the work is to inform decisions on design of a successor warhead—work that is currently under way—and how much money is due to be spent on those studies in the current comprehensive spending review period? Also, what are the costs of the nuclear weapon sustainability programme at Aldermaston, and will the Minister make those costs public?

I will conclude with this point—I have set out my position absolutely clearly. I believe that nuclear weapons are immoral and wrong, and we have huge obligations and huge opportunities through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, not only to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons but to promote a nuclear weapons convention that would bring the non-declared nuclear weapons states—Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea—into the discussions about ridding the world of nuclear weapons altogether. If we are serious about going down that road and achieving a nuclear-free world, we have to do something about it and set an example. It is a pretty strange example to deny Parliament the opportunity to discuss Trident in detail, so that it can know the expenditure involved, and to commit ourselves to this vast expenditure on a weapon of mass destruction that—if ever used—will indiscriminately kill millions of people on this planet. As I have said, nuclear weapons are immoral, wrong and dangerous, but we have a right to know the levels of expenditure on them. I hope that this debate is the start of many debates on this subject. Many of us who are committed on this subject will keep on raising it, so that we know the truth about the amount of money that this country is spending on weapons of mass destruction.