THE world is a much-changed place from when Aneurin Bevan made his momentous U-turn on nuclear weapons in 1957. Bevan – the father of the NHS, scourge of the Tories and implacable opponent of the nuclear deterrent – caused many of his followers to gnash their teeth when he suddenly decided that not to have them “would send a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference-chamber”.



You can speculate endlessly about whether Bevan, if he were around today, would have maintained that position or not. In 1957, barely a decade after the Second World War, the concept of mass destruction was not merely an abstract horror which few believe will ever occur any time in the near future. In that war, more than 60 million people were killed - around 3% of the world’s population. While the creation of the old European Common Market stemmed from a shared desire never to repeat this evil there was also a very strong sense among ordinary people that some things were worth dying for.

The Suez crisis the year before had almost pitched Britain into one of the most bizarre and ill-advised wars in its priapic military history. Our inevitable and humiliating retreat from Egypt was the beginning of the end of Britain as a significant force in the world. So you could understand why some might have felt in defiance that while we still possessed nuclear weapons we still had to be taken seriously.

Moreover, since the fall of the Third Reich and the Potsdam Agreement, the US and its implacable cultural enemy the Soviet Union had been lobbing diplomatic hand grenades at each other with such increasing ferocity that many were genuinely fearful of a third world war in which cities and not armies would be on the front line. It might have seemed to have made a bit more sense being in the nuclear club at a time like this.

Nearly 60 years later who now seriously believes that Britain – broken, indolent, deluded and self-indulgent Britain – is a significant world power and that we are threatened by the bombs of three dodgy Asian regimes? Yet 471 English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs voted to renew the Trident weapons system at a cost of £205bn. One Scottish MP joined them, the Tory David Mundell.

Thus, and hugely ironically, the vote to retain Trident following closely that to leave Europe has probably brought Britain nearer to disintegration than ever before. It is now inconceivable that Nicola Sturgeon will not call for a quick second independence referendum. And it is laughable that a country, so reduced by Brexit and the loss of a quarter of its realm, will still commit itself to spending £205bn on nuclear weapons.

Every one of the 56 MPs elected to represent the SNP voted against renewing Trident and it’s clear that, just like the EU referendum, a clear majority of the country has similarly rejected England’s extraordinary act of turning in on itself and circling the wagons. In the EU referendum a tiny, hard-right cabal persuaded ordinary, working people to swallow a series of lies and myths. In the Trident debate mainly English MPs are committing £205bn on the back of another set of myths.

Nuclear weapons have never helped to keep the peace while their possession renders us much more vulnerable. Britain’s security and the health of its people is threatened more by terrorism, cyber-strikes and disease than by a nuclear strike. And there have been hundreds of wars throughout the world since 1945. It is only by luck and by God’s good grace that no nuclear weapons have been deployed in any of these.

They do not drive any part of the UK’s economy to any significant degree while their cost restricts growth and investment in other more sustainable sectors. Margaret Thatcher nearly bankrupted the country paying off almost the entire mining industry to pursue her dream of a jungle society where only the fittest would survive. She had to use the receipts from North Sea oil to help her write cheques of £200k for long-serving mineworkers. The UK has around 11,000 civilians dependent on nuclear weapons. You could write each of them a cheque for £1m and it still wouldn’t touch the sides of the financial hole left after you pay for Trident.

We do not have sole control over them and our possession of them and possible future deployment of them may yet be determined by the whim of Donald Trump. The USA will become the most unstable rogue state on the planet if Trump gains the White House later this year.

The enemies of most working people in this country aren’t North Korea, Iran or Iraq. None of these has been responsible for low mortality rates, high unemployment, slave wages and a widening gap between rich and poor in a land of plenty. You can’t blame these so-called rogue states for the fact that hundreds of thousands of children in the UK do not know where they will be sleeping tonight or if they will receive a proper meal.

The government of only one country presents a clear and present danger to the health of hundreds of thousands of our poorest people and that’s the Conservative government of an increasingly unhinged UK parliament based at Westminster. For the first time in more than a century these people don’t even have a party to fight for them at Parliament. The Labour Party is dead, buried under a stampede of careerist, insipid Blairites who completed the job that Thatcher began in 1975.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of Theresa May’s Christian faith and I understand why she said she wouldn’t hesitate to push the nuclear button. “The whole point of a deterrent,” she said, “is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to.”

It’s just that I value more the Christian position adopted by the Church of Scotland which has stated that “nuclear weapons are so destructive and so harmful to civilians and the natural world that they are inherently evil; to possess, threaten or use such terrible weapons of mass destruction is a dreadful concept which fundamentally threatens the future of humanity as a species. The Churches are convinced that lasting peace comes about not through threatening destruction but through reconciliation and shared prosperity.”

'Tories are out of touch with Trident obsession'

