The Liberal Democrats. It’s a long time since we thought about them, isn’t it? It’s actually a long since we thought they were relevant. But we should never forget that they are directly responsible for the coalition government – and for every single one of its sins. I’ve heard the weasel words and limp excuses. All a variation on ‘a big boy did it and he ran away’. Well, no actually. With out the Lib Dems the recovery would not have put on hold for three years. Without the Lib Dems there would have been no ‘welfare reform’ – no bedroom tax, no assault on people with disabilities. Without the Lib Dems – a nicer, kinder, better Britain.
They want us all to forget the recent unpleasantness and to see them as a caring, sharing left-of-centre party again. Just in time for next year’s election. So senior Lib Dems keep popping up everywhere making announcements meant to buy them votes. And to wash the blood off their hands.
We mustn’t let them.
I know we are fighting on a lot of fronts at the moment. And that there are so many stranger political stories around. My current favourite is the right-wing Tories going up to David Cameron holding a gun to their own heads: ‘If you don’t do what we want, we’ll pull the trigger.’ Be that as it may, we can’t neglect Clegg and his gang. And I, for one, have always seen fighting Tories as a duty, but hunting Lib Dems as a pleasure. This has been a ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ government – they all have their fingerprints on the murder weapon. Let’s never let the voters forget it.
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There’s a weird 80s revival going on at the moment. We have Russian aggression into Europe. (For that is where Ukraine is, unless we buy the 19th century nonsense of spheres of influence.) At the same time there is a strange upsurge in people who think that unilateral nuclear disarmament is progressive. Mainly in Scotland at the moment – but the phenomenon is indicative of something broader. Labour has pretty well abandoned making the case for the deterrent.
There has been a judgment made in Scotland that we can’t fight and win the argument for Trident on its own merits. This is wrong, in my view. Scotland is just like the rest of the country – there has never been a majority for us giving up nuclear weapons while others have them. And the only time Labour tried arguing otherwise, we went down to successive disastrous election defeats.
To give up on the argument for the deterrent is a dereliction of responsibility. I am not blaming our shadow defence teams – past or present. Jim Murphy and Vernon Coaker have both made powerful principled and political arguments for our forces and for the deterrent. The point is that all of the shadow cabinet should carry this case. We are not a pacifist – we are the founder members of Nato which is a mutual self-defence treaty including the deployment of nuclear weapons. And it is because of the deterrent and not despite it that Nato has preserved the peace in Europe for nearly 70 years.
In government we will have to remake the case for the deterrent and renew public consent for it. We have seen in Scotland the danger of leaving a false argument unanswered.
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John McTernan is former political secretary at 10 Downing Street and was director of communications for former prime minister of Australia Julia Gillard. He writes The Last Word column on Progress and tweets @johnmcternan
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Photo: Alan Denney
I wonder if the author saw Trident deterring Saddam’s goes nuclear weapons in 2003? Surely if deterrence works, then there was no point in wasting conventional armed forces in illegally invading a country that might have had WMDs–and turned out they did not. And surely Russia “niuke” Crimea–but took it via a referendum. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban blows up troops and civilians with cheap IEDs will the UK’sV boat roam under the sea, unable to deter IEDs. And the the greater Middle East, it takes knives and beheading while SLBMs can’t stop IS atrocities.
Ok, let’s look at the North Korea threat. They can “sure reach” the UK. Then what? Nuke Pyonyang back and spread the fall out to South Korea?
Bottom line, nuclear weapons cannot deter. Meanwhile, conventional fores (UK and other countries) are cut to the bone and have to battle threats that several hundred kiloton SLBMs (which are not even UK made) cannot deter.
Nuclear weapons can’t deter, he says. History says otherwise, else we would all be speaking Russian. OK they are not meant to deter Islamic nutters using IEDs and beheading all who oppose them, but then they are not meant to. You can only fight that sort of fire with more and bigger fires.
However if the Mullahs in Iran, or the North Korean despots, or the Pakistani democrats (ho-ho-ho) understand that use of a nuclear weapon by them anywhere outside their borders will result in the effective destruction of them, their cities and their people, and an enormous setback for their brand of Islam’s desire to subjugate the world, then it is deterring what it is meant to.