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Trident

I accept my hon. Friend’s argument and will go on to make it in more detail. Those who argue that the decision can be taken at a later stage are simply wrong. They should be clear that by recommending delay they are putting at a very high risk the capacity to build boats in future, for all the reasons set out in the Defence Committee’s fourth report on the skills base. In effect, those who support delay back the unilateralist something-for-nothing approach. If our capacity to build submarines falls apart, the idea that the Americans will sell us the boats is not at all credible, as the Defence Secretary told us in his evidence on 6 February. This relates to the skills needed to maintain the submarines and corresponds with what I have been told on visits to bases where that maintenance is performed. As soon as the design concept was made available for the Vanguard submarines, our US allies made it clear that we had to take ownership of them and understand them inside out. Only in that way can we have a deterrent that is independent and that we are capable of managing to the very highest of safety standards—an essential characteristic, as I am sure all hon. Members would agree, of a system with such awesome potential destructive force. If we want a deterrent, we need to decide to give the go-ahead now and to build it ourselves. Why do we need the deterrent? The reason comes down to human behaviour. Optimists might believe that if we set an example, others will follow, but there is no evidence that that would happen if we were to give up our deterrent now. Iran and North Korea do not appear to be hanging around waiting for us to make a decision. Sadly, the world is becoming more uncertain in this respect, not less. When we ask people whether they would like to give up nuclear weapons and spend the money on something else, of course they say yes. However, when we ask whether we should do so before others do it, a clear majority say no. Fundamentalists, dictators, tyrants and, yes, terrorists are all bullies, in my book. In democracies, there are all sorts of ways of checking the worst excesses, and the ultimate safety valve is the ability to change the people in power through the ballot box. Bullies, however, are best stood up to by those who know the difference between being assertive and being aggressive, and that is something that the UK does really well. All hon. Members take pride in the role of our armed forces in peacekeeping and peace-making. Their role of standing up to some of the world’s most aggressive bullies to create enough space for the bullied to regroup, to regain confidence and to assert their right to a better way of life—as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan—is often more controversial. However, that is as much about our security as it is about theirs. These days not many of us are called on to put ourselves in harm’s way to achieve such outcomes, but it is British men and women—and, increasingly, their Commonwealth and Gurkha colleagues—who tend to be at the forefront of taking such action on our behalf. Our deterrent is deployed all the time, and it has given us in western Europe freedom from the kind of mass killing that two world wars brought in the first half of the 20th century. It also has a part to play in creating the context in which we use hard power to make that space for ourselves and others to do the peacekeeping, peace-making and stabilisation work. In the even more uncertain times ahead—in which state-sponsored terrorism might well be joined by tensions arising from population movements driven by climate change, drought and water shortages in particular, and by greater use of nuclear energy in the world—whatever we decide on nuclear energy, it is highly probable that the deterrent will have an increasingly clear role. With the emergence of new superpowers and their client states and interests, we must not risk falling hostage to blackmail in relation to their retained and emerging nuclear arsenals. Only a nuclear deterrent can deter nuclear threats. I believe that retention gives us a more powerful hand in working for non-proliferation. We are the only permanent member of the Security Council to have reduced to one platform—the submarine—and we have only 1 per cent. of the world’s nuclear weapons. Our seat on the Security Council certainly does not depend on our continuing to have a nuclear deterrent, but with it we can use our achievement of reaching a minimal deterrent to pull others in that direction. We should maintain the multilateralist position of seeking something for something, not something for nothing. The arguments are, at heart, not only simple but the same as they have always been: something for something, or something for nothing; multilateralism versus unilateralism. For the reasons that I have set out, all the amendments tabled today—including the one that has been selected—would result in back-door unilateralism, even though people do not quite understand that. That would happen because of the delay, and because of the engendering of a lack of confidence in the industry and in the individuals who work in it. Unilateralists tell us that we can reconstitute the skills base or keep it on ice, but neither claim is true. Scientists and engineers who do this work at the cutting edge of science, along with those who design and make space ships, have skills that are literally in the realms of rocket science. They will not stick around in large enough numbers and complex teams to do anything less. People need look no further than the cost and time overruns on the Astute submarine programme to see the risks of letting the skills base fall apart. I have spoken mostly of the submarine, but I also wanted to say that the Government have responded to the Select Committee’s report, and to deal with the points of my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) about the missile. Knowing the risks of letting the skill base fall apart, only those who believe in giving away something for nothing—unilateralists— should go on into the Aye Lobby on the amendment. Multilateralists cannot credibly share the same lobby with them.