Crispin Blunt, the Conservative MP for Reigate and Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, believes that even in today’s increasingly hostile geopolitical climate he can make a paradisiacal island for himself on reasoned argument’s milk and honey. What folly Mr. Blunt!
For Mr. Blunt was the only Conservative MP to vote yesterday against the renewal of the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear deterrent. 322 clearheaded Conservatives voted in favour of renewing the programme, and even 140 Labour members managed to shrug off the disarray of their party to see sense, as the motion passed with an overwhelming majority of 472 votes to 117.
47 Labour MPs voted against renewal while a few stragglers abstained, offering scant succour to Jeremy Corbyn as he desperately clings to the sodden breeches of power. The rest of the nuclear naysayers must have come from the Lib Dems and Scottish Nationalists!
Blunt might think that he had good cause to vote against, citing the spiralling costs for replacing the current class of Vanguard submarines, the risk that new technologies will render ballistic missile subs effectively obsolete or prone to cyber attacks, and the programme’s inefficiency when it comes to syncing with the defence capacity of our allies. He even offered an alternative which would allow the UK to remain a minor nuclear power. In his own words, Blunt summed up:
‘Britain’s independent possession of nuclear weapons has been turned into a political touch-stone for commitment to national defence. But this is an illusion. The truth is that this is a political weapon, effectively aimed against the Labour Party, whose justification rests on the defence economics, the politics, and the strategic situation of over three decades ago. But it is of less relevant to the defence of the UK today and certainly surplus to the needs of NATO.’
Yet clearly this is precisely the point Mr. Blunt! Just as what we fondly call a ‘deterrent’ might be used in a pinch to cow or decimate a fallen foe, so this is precisely the moment – after a swift handover of Tory power – for delivering a swift kick to the midsection of sorry Labour, in the hope that we might be done with them once and for all, or at least for another election cycle.
Moreover in the face of Brexit and with a new Prime Minister in Theresa May, now is the time to project an image of ourselves as boldly independent, constitutionally brave, and more than a little bloody minded. Who cares if the ability to defend ourselves these days relies on NATO? What better way to show strength and secure new friendships than the threat of the bomb?
