Trident

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Deidre Brock

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

I should start by declaring an interest as a member of the Scottish CND.

Like the other members of the Public Accounts Committee, I have an advantage in approaching this debate, because we took evidence from the permanent under-secretary to the Ministry of Defence.

[Tom Tugendhat]

rose—

[Deidre Brock]

Please let me make a little progress.

We heard for ourselves the MOD’s misgivings about Trident and how it is unaffordable and threatens spending on other equipment.

The Prime Minister’s war drums are beating. He wants to open up another war front in Syria, to add to the current commitments of service personnel around the globe, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. While we have troops engaged abroad, the MOD was telling us that the inventory of support matériel for the armed forces has been cut by a quarter in the past four years, and that the funding is about to be slashed from £30 billion to less than £10 billion by keeping what was described as

“the minimum amount of kit”.

Spending on Trident, however, is to be protected and enhanced.

We were told that a huge gap of some £8.5 billion exists between what the generals, admirals and air chief marshals say the armed forces need and what Whitehall is prepared to provide. In the words of the permanent under-secretary,

“a process of going through what people want and saying, ‘I know you like that fantastic new thing. Actually, what you need is this’, will lower the bill.”

Whitehall bean-counters will be telling the armed forces what they really need, but spending on Trident will be sacrosanct. There will be no back-up body armour for troops on the battlefield, but there will be plenty of cash for Trident. Provision of troop transport options will be a matter for Whitehall, but the transport of weapons of mass destruction cannot be questioned.

We were told that the nuclear enterprise is what keeps the MOD’s senior civil servants awake at night. The permanent under-secretary said that the current annual running cost of Trident is

“in excess of £3.5 billion”,

but that if it is renewed the figure will rise to more than £5 billion a year. He said that he could drive savings in other areas,

“but that project is a monster and it is an incredibly complicated area in which to try to estimate future costs.”

Therefore, while Trident—an unusable and abhorrent abuse of scientific discovery and human imagination—can name its price and pick the pockets of any other budget in the MOD, other parts of the service are resourced or starved on a Whitehall whim.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I appreciate that the hon. Lady was in Australia at the time, acting in various episodes of “Home and Away”, but is she aware that during the 1970s the CND was largely funded by the KGB, as the Mitrokhin archive proves? Some of these arguments therefore sound a little hollow when they are made with the cash of our enemies.

[Deidre Brock]

That is a very amusing intervention, given that I am quoting the MOD’s so-called chief executive. The hon. Gentleman’s comments are not worthy of this place.

The air crews that the Prime Minister wants in the Syrian skies cannot be sure of a reliable supply of spare parts for their planes, but Trident will always have whatever it needs.

There is another insult in the midst of that mess, as the MOD outsources logistics and supply for armed forces to Leidos, an American firm that started out providing advice to the American defence nuclear industry. Those of us who campaigned in the independence referendum will recall being told that no vital pieces of defence infrastructure are provided by companies from outwith our borders. How things change and yet stay so much the same.

We might also want to take note of the legal position. My constituent Ronald King Murray—Lord Murray—who is a former Lord Advocate for Scotland and a respected legal thinker, has offered the opinion that nuclear weapons are illegal under international law. Given what the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) said about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I point out that Lord Murray was a serving soldier preparing to attack Japanese positions when the first atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima 70 years ago, and he thinks it may well have saved his life. However, he formed the opinion then, in spite of the preservation of his own life, that the weapon is probably illegal, and his opinion has not changed in the seven decades since.

Lord Murray suggests that the International Court of Justice might use the occasion of the case being brought by the Marshall Islands to update and enhance its 1996 ruling, which is that the use, or threatened use, of nuclear weapons was illegal. It may well decide now to rule that the possession of such weapons is illegal.