Trident Nuclear Submarine, HMS Victorious. Image: Flickr/Some rights reserved
Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon didn’t really want to talk about Trident in his Times article and Radio Four appearance yesterday. He wanted to talk about Ed Miliband. The jarringly shrill claim that the Leader of the Opposition would “stab the United Kingdom in the back” by failing to renew Trident, just as he had “stabbed his own brother in the back” by contesting the Labour leadership, is part of a long-standing and increasingly desperate effort to portray Miliband as an untrustworthy and dangerous “other”. As well as being distasteful in its own right, Fallon’s outburst has also precluded more mature debate over a rather important question; namely whether or not the British government should retain its ability to exterminate millions of innocent people.
Since the demise of the USSR, Trident’s defenders have invented an ingenious new excuse to retain the system: the fact that we live in an “uncertain world”. As Fallon told the Today programme, “the main argument is very simple….You can’t be clear what the threats are to this country that might emerge in the 2030s, the 2040s and the 2050s…. Therefore it would be foolhardy to abandon our nuclear submarines”. Miliband used the same argument in an interview last weekend, saying that Trident needed to be renewed “in an uncertain and unstable world”. The fact that the political class speaks in unison on this says everything you need to know about the artificial nature of yesterday’s row.
