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Trident

Twelve months ago, when the Defence Committee started its first inquiry on Trident, I adopted a fairly sceptical approach. However, several issues have become clearer to me over those 12 months, principally the question of the timing of the decision. Believe me, if I thought that it was reasonable to delay the decision until after the next election, I would be voting for that tonight and I would have been urging the Select Committee to make that one of its recommendations. However, we must consider the industrial base and skills that are required. All the advice that we received from the UK military said that the process would take 17 years. Our first report questioned why the time period was 17 years rather than 14 years, which was the case at the time of the 1980 decision. We have heard a good explanation for that—although the initial design and conceptual work had been done prior to 1980, it has not yet been done at this stage. I am surprised by the attitude of the Lib Dems. They have made it clear that they support that design and conceptual work. If they felt that they were being bounced into making a long-term decision to commit themselves to four boats between 2012 and 2014, they had the opportunity to table an amendment providing simply that they would agree to the initial design and conceptual work. I have read the amendment that most Lib Dem Members have signed, but such a provision is not in there. It seems that a lot of people are playing the ““I’m a multilateralist, but I want to avoid making a decision”” card. I remember knocking on doors in the 1980s when the Labour party had a unilateralist position. I was comfortable with that, but it seemed to me that while some people were passionately in favour of that position—they would put up posters and deliver leaflets, and they wanted a Labour Government who would get rid of nuclear weapons unilaterally—many lifelong traditional Labour voters shuffled away, would not look one in the eye and ended up voting for the Social Democratic party, which was largely made up of ex-Labour people who had joined because they did not feel happy with our unilateral position, and then for the Liberals. In 1989, Labour changed its decision at its party conference, and many of us found that difficult. However, I have fought four general elections, and won three of them, on party manifestos that promised to retain Trident and to take a multilateral approach. The Labour party’s approach is that we will get rid of nuclear weapons only through negotiations, in which we say that we will put our nuclear weapons in the pot if other nuclear states do the same. That is the policy on which all three major parties fought the 2005 election. It would be undemocratic if we made a decision today that made it impossible for the people of this country to elect, in three years’ time, a Government who could build a new Trident successor. If the White Paper had put forward the view that we should not replace Trident, I would have expected an honourable Government such as ours to recommend that the design work and work on the initial concept still went ahead, so that if, in three years’ time, a Government were elected who wanted to retain the nuclear deterrent, they would have the capacity to do so. If we do anything other than back the Government motion tonight, we will go against the manifesto commitment that more than 600 Members—