---

Trident

Like a previous speaker, I have received not a single letter from any of my constituents urging me to vote with the Government tonight in favour of replacing Trident. However, not for one moment do I think that there is not a strong understanding in my constituency and throughout the country of the need for this House to vote in favour of a replacement tonight. Yes, our constituents put us here to talk about the most immediate and pressing issues that they face, and for many those are public services, NHS dentistry, and the closure of accident and emergency wards and local tax offices, for example. However, they also put us here to take the difficult and unattractive decisions that do not satisfy any immediate interests, but which are nevertheless vital to the national interest. The decision before us tonight is one such decision. A number of constituents and local church and environmental groups have contacted me, expressing concern about, and opposition to, the notion that we should support replacing Trident. I do not intend to discuss all the various arguments, a number of which have already been covered more than adequately, but one idea that has some currency in the country is that Parliament has not been given enough opportunities to examine rigorously all the issues affecting the decision that we are about to take. That notion has been scotched well and truly, however. There have been three Select Committee reports and a White Paper, and numerous opportunities for Members to visit Her Majesty’s naval base Clyde, at Faslane and Coulport, in order to have frank discussions with a wide variety of service and civilian personnel in management and operational roles, and to question them about the nature of our deterrent and how it is managed. So Parliament has had adequate opportunity to scrutinise the issues before us. A number of my constituents have also expressed the view that since the end of the cold war, the world has changed so fundamentally that nuclear weapons and the nuclear deterrent are redundant. A local church group said to me that since 9/11, the world had changed so much that nuclear weapons had no place any more. It is true that since the end of the cold war, the nature of the threat has changed; no one is pretending otherwise. It is also true that our nuclear capability and posture and the configuration of our nuclear resources have changed to reflect that change. In some of the correspondence that I have received, the view has also been expressed that since 9/11 a new era has been ushered in, in which terrorist attacks have displaced the threat of strategic nuclear strikes, and that because nuclear weapons are less relevant in the war on terrorism, they are redundant in this new era. That view is dangerously misguided. Of course nuclear weapons are futile in deterring someone from blowing themselves up on the No. 12 bus, but so is most of the kit that comprises most of our conventional warfare capability. The fact is that the nuclear deterrent serves a very limited but vital purpose: to help create the conditions in which a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom would be futile, and therefore highly unlikely. There has been a lot of discussion this afternoon about what is unknown about the future strategic threats that this country will face in the decades ahead. There is indeed a lot that we do not know, but there are some assumptions that we can make. We can assume that the number of countries seeking to acquire a nuclear capability will increase. Although we might have no idea of the intent in the decades ahead of countries that will have such a capability, we can fairly safely assume that the march of political freedom and liberalism across the globe will not progress uniformly. There will continue to be points of collision between the values of liberalism—it is one of our country’s destinies to promote those values throughout the globe—and manifestations of tyranny. So it is not totally outlandish to envisage a scenario in which the UK might once again be a target of a nuclear state. In a world in which an increasing number of rogue states and illiberal regimes are seeking to acquire a nuclear capability, it is essential that a core of strong liberal democratic nations retain their nuclear deterrents for the foreseeable future. While it is difficult to identify any nation on earth now whose nuclear capability combines with an aggressive intent to pose an existing threat to the UK, the fact is that we can never say that such a threat will not re-emerge in the decades ahead. A minimum credible nuclear deterrent is therefore vital. Trident has proved successful as a flexible and secure platform for maintaining that deterrent, and the time has come for the House to make the positive decision to replace it.