Jeremy Corbyn might have shown a lifelong commitment to nuclear disarmament, joining the CND as a teenager all the way back in 1966 and campaigning resolutely on its behalf, before becoming vice chair of the organisation and finally vice president last October. But this sort of conviction politics is old hat, quite out of place from the perspective of the modern and aspiring man-about-town.
So when Corbyn made a stand yesterday against the renewal of the Trident nuclear programme – noting the exorbitant cost, now set to run up to £180 billion over the course of its lifetime, and saying ‘I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations’ – the Labour leader was suitably scolded by Labour MP Jamie Reed.
A former shadow health and shadow environment minister, Reed had nothing nice to say about the stylings of the man he has already roundly rejected, calling Corbyn’s opposition to Trident an example of ‘reckless, juvenile, narcissistic irresponsibility’ which ‘makes me fearful for the future of the party that I love’.
Jamie Reed has a conviction of his own, having spent his younger days as a press officer at Sellafield, the site which emerged in the late 1940s as the producer of plutonium for the United Kingdom’s nascent nuclear weapons programme. Sellafield has since been responsible for more than twenty serious incidents involving the discharge of radioactive waste, making the Irish Sea one of the most polluted seas in the world, and becoming enveloped in controversies from the contamination of animals and beaches to the unauthorised removal of organ tissue from deceased former employees.
Since 2005, Sellafield has functioned as a nuclear decommissioning and fuel reprocessing site. And it was in the same year that Reed became MP for the Cumbrian constituency of Copeland, where Sellafield is located. Now aged forty-two, in recent years Reed has advocated for a new nuclear waste dump within Cumbria.
But Reed’s commitment to nuclear technology evidently extends beyond decommissioning, reprocessing, disposal, and its use as an energy source. What do you get for the man who has everything? Why not some state-of-the-art nuclear missiles? Leave juvenile Jeremy Corbyn to play with the stuffed toys and Lego blocks.
