US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement

John Leech Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)]

I add my congratulations to the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. He is talking as though he is surprised about the lack of scrutiny. I am not surprised in the slightest, because if we had any decent level of scrutiny, it would be very clear that replacing Trident is a complete waste of money.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am basically a very optimistic person—in our line of work and with my view on politics, Sir Roger, I have to be an optimist, otherwise I would be very sad. I am optimistic that every Government want to consult Parliament and want Parliament to approve of things, but we have to face the reality that the lack of a written constitution and of a clear delineation of power, particularly on foreign affairs and treaty matters, means that the Government of the day, whatever party it is, do not have to consult Parliament on agreeing a treaty—or, indeed, on going to war—unless we change the relevant legislation. As the hon. Gentleman knows, there is a war powers Bill before Parliament, but I do not have much hope of it getting through Parliament, despite my inevitable optimism on all these matters.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The way I suggest the hon. Gentleman deals with the issue is simply this: there are five declared nuclear weapons states, which all happen to be the five permanent members of the Security Council, and there are three other states that have nuclear weapons that we know of for sure—India, Pakistan and Israel. Then, there are questions about North Korea, which has some nuclear explosive capability. That leaves a very large number of other states that have no nuclear weapons. A considerable number of states have voluntarily given up nuclear weapons, such as South Africa, Argentina and Brazil, and there are others. If weapons of mass destruction were ever used, they could only create an environmental disaster where they go off and an economic disaster across the whole planet—and possibly an environmental disaster for the whole planet with a nuclear winter. They are something that we should not, could not and never would countenance the use of. However, every state, by possessing nuclear weapons, clearly does countenance their use, otherwise they would not possess them. I think security comes from disarmament, not from rearmament, and this is also going to cost us a great deal of money.

The hon. Gentleman and I might not agree on that, but that is a view I strongly hold. It is not just my view, but that of millions of people around the world who do not wish to live under a nuclear umbrella, because they fear it could become a nuclear cloud.

[Mr Leech]

I add that the countries that own nuclear weapons have all been involved in wars since having nuclear weapons, so it has not stopped them from ending up in some sort of conflict.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Indeed; those countries have all been involved in conflicts, and we have come near to the use of nuclear weapons in the case of Korea and in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Clearly, their existence poses a threat. When the House debated Trident renewal in 2007, many Members took the view that Britain’s security depended on having nuclear weapons. If that was the case, someone could argue for any country in the world developing nuclear weapons on the basis that that would guarantee its security.

As I have explained, the reality is that the vast majority of nations do not have nuclear weapons and do not want them. Although some are under a nuclear alliance such as NATO, many are not and do not possess nuclear weapons, yet have massive natural resources. Many countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia are part of nuclear weapons-free zones. That is my view.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and a pleasure, as always, to follow the eloquent case made by the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). I am always happy to support him when he applies for debates such as this, just as he is always happy to support me when I apply for debates about nuclear deterrence. The reason why we are happy to support each other, despite taking entirely opposite views, is that we both feel that we have a good case to make.

There is no earthly reason why Parliament should be shy of debating such an important matter. The hon. Gentleman may find it a trifle more disappointing than I do that if we took a trip down memory lane to a similar debate in the 1980s, the Chamber would be full of people wishing to contribute. He and I have, to put it mildly, struggled a little to get people to come along and take part in this debate, for the simple reason that the issue is not nearly as contentious now as it was two or three decades ago.

I venture to suggest that that is because the British public have spoken on the matter, over and over again. They spoke decisively on it in the general elections of 1983 and 1987, when the question of Britain one-sidedly abandoning its nuclear deterrent was central to campaigning. They have spoken time and again in public opinion polls. Of course, it is possible to vary the answers that we receive in such polls according to the questions we ask. However, when we ask what I regard as the fundamental question: “Do you think that Britain should continue to possess a nuclear deterrent or nuclear weapons while other countries have them?”, invariably, about two thirds of the respondents say yes, about a quarter say no and a small, single-figure fraction are undecided. The issue is divisive, because fundamentally it is an article of faith. Are we more likely to keep the peace by getting rid of such weapons unconditionally or by showing a potential enemy that it would be too dangerous to attack us with their nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction?

[Mr Leech]

What does the hon. Gentleman think the answer would be if we asked the general public whether they would prefer to dump Trident rather than sack soldiers?

[Dr Lewis]

I think it would depend on the extent of the debate that had taken place before the question was asked. I would be confident that if there were to be a debate on the subject, the public would come to share my view that no amount of conventional forces can be adequate to prevent an attack on us by an enemy armed with weapons of mass destruction if we lack the means to retaliate in similar terms.

While I am dealing with the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, let me return to a point that he made earlier in an intervention on the hon. Member for Islington North. He pointed out that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence had not abolished war, and that wars continued all over the planet. That is not an argument against nuclear deterrence; it is an argument in favour of it. After the second world war, if we had lived through 50 years of hostility between the then Soviet bloc and the west and there had been no conflicts anywhere in the world in which the nuclear balance of terror did not apply, one could indeed make the case that the nuclear balance of terror had had nothing to do with the prevention of war. The reality was that proxy wars were being fought by client states of the superpowers during the cold war, but the one thing that the superpowers never dared to do was to fight against one another directly, because they knew the potential outcome of all-out war between nuclear-armed powers.

Why is it important to have a debate on the matter, even though public opinion is fairly settled and parliamentary opinion is fairly relaxed? There are two reasons.