Friday 2 October 2015

United against Trident

I was deeply disappointed at the reason Unite trades union leader Len McCluskey gave the media  for Unites's support of the renewal of the Trident nuclear WMD system: that it provided secure jobs for his members.
He said he understood the arguments against Trident on strategic, defence, cost and moral grounds, but jobs came above all else.
I am absolutely sure the trades unions would not have supported the building of gas chambers in the second world war on the grounds it kept members in work; yet if just one of the 180 nuclear warheads deployed on Trident were used on a city, it would kill in one detonation more than the six million innocent people killed in the gas chambers by the Nazis.
The trades union leadership should read carefully the report published by the Nuclear Education Trust in 2014 on "Trident Alternatives Review and the Future of Barrow," that demonstrates in detail how the workforce currently dependent  on trident can be productively redeployed on alternative emanufacturing.(http://www.nucleareducationtrust.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77&Itemid=76)
That is surely both ethically and industrially a more sustainable jobs strategy that both Labour and trades unions ought to support.
That is why I was so pleased Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn so strongly re-affirmed his opposition to  nuclear weapons, Trident included, in his ethical,  thoughtful and constructive maiden speech to the Labour Party conference this week.

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