Fans of the 1980s British comedy series Yes Prime Minister (eventually adapted to Ji Mantriji) may recall its opening episode where Prime Minister Jim Hacker, in an effort to come up with a stand-out policy, mulls the option of scrapping Britain’s nuclear missile defence system, citing its high cost and utility. “It costs £15 billion and we don’t need it,” declares Mr. Hacker, to which Sir Humphrey, the Cabinet Secretary, infamously prone to obfuscation, struggles to give a convincing answer, even though, as is often the case in their policy battles, he emerges victorious in preventing any change in policy.

First commissioned by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the Trident nuclear programme, made up of four armed submarines capable of carrying up to 8 Trident missiles, based out western Scotland, has been a controversial issue in Britain from the outset. While opposed by many in Scotland (in particular, the Scottish National Party, which continues to oppose it on strategic, moral and financial grounds) it has also faced opposition in the U.K. from groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which attracted hundreds of thousands to its rallies in the 1980s.

Trident has resurfaced as a political issue in recent years, ahead of last year’s parliamentary vote to renew the system. While the government estimated it would cost around £31 billion, the CND has put the cost at over £200 billion, and argued that they’ve become “strategically irrelevant” in the face of the new threats faced by Britain. In January, the government faced further questions as The Timesrevealed details of a failure of the first firing test of a Trident missile in four years in June 2016, off the coast of Florida.

Narrow majority

While polls have shown a narrow majority of the public support the renewal of Trident, opposing it has remained a political taboo in England at least, despite the fiscal pressures on the government, which has prompted deep public sector cuts. Even the Liberal Democrats support the maintenance of Trident, though they want the number of submarines reduced to three. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had spent many of his years as a backbench MP opposing nuclear deterrence and Trident.“The nuclear weapons that the United States holds, all the hundreds if not thousands of warheads they’ve got, were of no help to them on 9/11,” he said back in 2015. But in his early days as leader, he faced a backlash over his outspoken criticism of the programme from within the party and from supporting union leaders, some of whom made their support for him contingent on a change of stance on this issue. The Conservatives seized the issue in an attempt to shake public confidence in Mr. Corbyn on security issues.

Labour has included a commitment to Trident in its latest manifesto published last week — a move which has disappointed the CND and others who have campaigned against it. However, there remains a glimmer of hope for them, with the Labour’s spokesperson on foreign affairs hinting that Trident could be included in the strategic defence review that the party would conduct should it come to power. Mr. Corbyn himself has spoken of the huge questions around it and his preparedness to authorise its use. “Its an extraordinary question when you think about — would you order the indiscriminate killings of millions? Would you risk such extensive contamination of the planet that no life could exist across large parts of the world?” he said earlier this month. With or without a Labour review, Trident as an issue is likely to stay with British politics for years, if not decades, to come.