Meeting of the Parliament 03 November 2015
I absolutely accept that, but we must continue with our campaign. I stretch out my hand of friendship to Mr Allard. We have been in the same campaign for some time and will continue with that.
The arguments are there to be taken on and won, and the fears that people have are there to be taken on and allayed. The military argument grows weaker by the day. Ex-generals such as Lord Bramall and General Ramsbotham say that changes in international politics make Trident, not the debate over its future, an irrelevance. They identify cybercrime, climate change and terrorism as the major threats to our security. There is no longer a two-horse superpower race—thankfully, the cold war is over. As one of my colleagues mentioned in the debate on Sunday, Russian investment in the United Kingdom is at a record high and, similarly, the UK’s business and financial links with China, India, Pakistan and France are all at record or near-record levels. That hardly makes us one of their top military targets. The military argument is not strong, and people such as Michael Portillo, Nick Harvey, Nick Brown and Crispin Blunt all agree with that.
For me, the jobs argument is important, because the workforce and communities that are affected by Trident are the key consideration in the debate. We have to give assurances to people in the supply chain, small businesses, engineers and fabricators that we have a real and genuine plan to create jobs—not imaginary jobs, but a guaranteed future. Surely with £167 billion we can do that. It is not beyond the wit of man to use that eye-watering sum of money for things that will benefit humanity, rather than for something that, if it were ever used, would destroy humanity.
I think that the minister said that our share of the money involved would be £13.9 billion. Mr Lamont questioned the figure of £167 billion. He might be right to question that figure, because it was a Tory member of Parliament who provided it, but let us take it at face value. If our share is £13.9 billion, we can create plenty of jobs with that. We should look at what happened in America when bases were closing and new jobs and infrastructure were created in a planned and strategic way. Surely we can replicate that with the eye-watering sums of money that are on the table.
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