Support for Trident is dwindling. Flickr/The Weekly Bull. Some rights reserved.
In an intemperate outburst –
some might call it an emotional spasm – John McTernan, ex-adviser to Tony
Blair, told Newsnight viewers on 21st July
that MPs who "lent" their nominations to Mr Corbyn to "broaden
the debate" were "morons".
One such MP was former
Labour stand-in Leader, Dame Margaret Beckett. During an interview with
BBC Radio 4's World at One today Mrs Beckett was asked if she was a moron
for nominating Mr Corbyn. She replied: "I
am one of them." She meant she was one of those who nominated Corbyn, not she
was a moron, though the press since has delighted in interpreting her comment
as she was admitting to being a moron!
McTernan is the
same political advisor who in the months running up to May’s
General Election advised Labour's outgoing leader in Scotland, Jim Murphy, the viscerally
pro-Trident former shadow defence secretary, who led Labour to an unprecedented
historic electoral wipe-out in Scotland, with only one Labour candidate winning
a seat (an openly anti-Trident politician, Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh East,
who is now shadow Scottish Secretary).
After a weekend of
collective political assassination by the press – when all the heavyweight
Sunday papers from the left-leaning Observer and Independent
on Sunday, the right wing Sunday Times and Sunday
Telegraph ran endless columns berating Corbyn personally and
politically, liberally buttressed by endless supine comments from Corbyn’s
Labour Party colleagues, all gutlessly quoted anonymously attacking him and all
he stands for.
The result? Recent
polling reported in the Times
suggests that Corbyn
is now even further ahead, putting him 17 % ahead of nearest rival, Andy
Burnham, of those recorded as planning to vote for him when the ballot opens
early next month.
A principled stand
One of the staunchest and
best thought out of Corbyn’s policies is his opposition not just to the
replacement of the Trident nuclear WMD system – with the planned £100
billion modernisation – but also his opposition to all nuclear weapons,
everywhere. In this he differs markedly from his three Labour leadership
rivals, Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Liz Kendall, each of whom, at a time of
extreme austerity, countenance spending that £100 billion of taxpayers’ money
on a high tech mass killing system, instead of on housing, health care, the
environment and “green jobs”, or global peacekeeping and international aid.
And mainstream political
commentators, including Jason Cowley, astonishingly the editor
of the formerly leftist political weekly, The New Statesman, who
chose to peddle his anti-Corbyn, pro-Trident views in the right wing Daily
Mail, still attack Corbyn’s policies.
So what does the “moron”
Dame Margaret Beckett think of nuclear weapons? Below are some extracts from her
valedictory keynote speech as Labour Foreign Secretary, made to a prestigious
conference in Washington DC, eight years ago, entitled: “A
World Free of Nuclear Weapons?”
Whose views – Corbyn’s,
Burnham, Cooper or Kendall – do they most resemble?
Remarks by
Margaret Beckett at Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, 25 June
2007
I expect that many – if not all – of you here today read an article which
appeared in the Wall Street Journal at the very start of 2007.
The writers would be as familiar to an audience in this country as they are
respected across the globe: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam
Nunn.
The article made the case for, and I quote, "a bold initiative consistent
with America's moral heritage". That initiative was to re-ignite the
vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and to redouble efforts on the
practical measures towards it.
(…)Let's look at the facts.
Despite the recent log-jam, the basic non-proliferation consensus is and has
been remarkably resilient. The grand bargain of the NPT has, by and large, held
for the past 40 years. The vast majority of states – including many that have
the technology to do so if they chose – have decided not to develop nuclear
weapons. And far fewer states than was once feared have acquired and retained
nuclear weapons.
Even more encouragingly, and much less well known outside this room, many more
states – South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, [Belarus], Argentina, Brazil
– have given up active nuclear weapons programmes, turned back from pursuing
such programmes, or – in the case of the former Soviet Union countries – chosen
to hand over weapons on their territory.
(…)But the important point is this: in none of those areas will we stand a
chance of success unless the international community is united in purpose as
well as in action.
And what that Wall Street Journal article, and for that matter
[the then UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan, have been quite right to identify
is that our efforts on non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if
others believe – however unfairly – that the terms of the grand bargain have
changed, that the nuclear weapon states have abandoned any commitment to
disarmament.
The point of doing more on disarmament, then, is not to convince the Iranians
or the North Koreans. I do not believe for one second that further reductions
in our nuclear weapons would have a material effect on their nuclear ambitions.
Rather the point of doing more is this: because the moderate majority of states
– our natural and vital allies on non-proliferation – want us to do more. And
if we do not, we risk helping Iran and North Korea in their efforts to muddy
the water, to turn the blame for their own nuclear intransigence back onto us.
They can undermine our arguments for strong international action in support of
the NPT by painting us as doing too little too late to fulfil our own
obligations. And that need to appear consistent, incidentally, is just as
true at the regional level. The international community's clear commitment to a
Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in successive UN resolutions has been
vital in building regional support for a tough line against Iran.
What we need is
both vision – a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons. And action –
progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear
weapons in security policy.
(…)The judgement we made
forty years ago, that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons was in all of
our interests – is just as true today as it was then. For more than sixty
years, good management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have
not been used. But we cannot rely on history just to repeat itself.
It would be a grave mistake for another reason, too. It underestimates the
power that commitment and vision can have in driving action.
And just as the vision gives rise to action, conversely so does action give
meaning to the vision. As that Wall Street Journal article put it:
"Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair and
urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or
possible"
Practical steps [to disarmament] include further reductions in warhead
numbers, particularly in the world's biggest arsenals. There are still over 20
000 warheads in the world. And the US and Russia hold about 96 per cent of
them. Almost no-one – politician, military strategist or scientist – thinks
that warheads in those numbers are still necessary to guarantee international
security.
(…) And I should make clear
here again, that when it will be useful to include in any negotiations the one
per cent of the world's nuclear weapons that belong to the UK, we will
willingly do so.
(…) When it comes to
building this new impetus for global nuclear disarmament, I want the UK to be
at the forefront of both the thinking and the practical work. To be, as it
were, a "disarmament laboratory".
(…) We intend to examine how to provide confidence that the dismantled
components of a nuclear warhead are not being returned to use in new warheads.
This will have to involve some form of monitored storage, with a difficult
balance once again to be struck between security concerns and verification
requirements. We are currently working on the design concepts for building such
a monitored store, so that we can more fully investigate these complex
practical issues.
I said earlier that I doubted that I would live to see a world free of nuclear
weapons. My sadness at such a thought is real. Mine is a generation that has
existed under the shadow of the bomb – knowing that weapons existed which could
bring an end to humanity itself. We have become almost accustomed to that
steady underlying dread, punctuated by the sharper fear of each new nuclear
crisis: Cuba in 1962, the Able Archer scare of 1983, the stand-off between
India and Pakistan in 2002.
But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow
our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the
non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us
all will lengthen and it will deepen. It may, one day, blot out the light for
good.
So my commitment to the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons is undimmed.
And though we in this room may never reach the end of that road, we can take
the first steps down it. For any generation, that would be a noble calling. For
ours, it is a duty.