Dumping Trident: don't take no for an answer!

 

In his resignation speech as Labour leader this lunchtime, Ed Miliband said: “The course of progress and social justice is never simple or straightforward. Change happens because people don’t give up, they don’t take no for an answer, they keep demanding change.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/ed-miliband-resigns-the-labour-leaders-resignation-speech--full-text-10236019.html)

He is right. So it must be with the absolute need  to change Labour’s misguided support of the Trident nuclear WMD system.

As the Labour Party begins its inquest into the catastrophic meltdown in Scotland, there is one positive political choice it can make: it should change its leader in Scotland, Jim Murphy, amongst the vanquished at the polls, who until being inexplicably elected to this role last year considering his macho pro-nuclear weapons views, was the party’s shadow defence secretary.

As such, he was a staunch cheerleader for spending 100 billion of taxpayers’ money on replacing the Trident nuclear WMD system, and made this a key stone of the Scottish Labour campaign strategy.

This lemming –like approach ran into the staunch opposition by the very effectively-led SNP, whose leader Nicola Sturgeon argued time and time again in both the referendum and general election campaign against Trident and its renewal.

The Scottish Labour campaign disenfranchised many excellent Labour candidates, such as former MPs Katy Clark and Cathy Jamieson, who opposed wasting scarce money on Trident, but nevertheless lost to SNP challengers whose party fully backed this sensible stance. Ian Murray, the only Scottish Labour candidate to be elected, was noticeably an overt and vociferous opponent of Trident.( http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/labour-mp-ian-murray-breaks-ranks-over-trident-1-3744485)

When Labour MPs gather, bruised, at Westminster, they should reverse Labour’s mad support for multibillion pound nuclear killing machines- and with SNP partners -  force the Conservative defence secretary to implement what  pre-election Tory defence secretary, Michael Fallon, told MPs in a  Parliamentary debate on Trident in January, when he said:

“we also share the vision of a world that is without nuclear weapons, achieved through multilateral disarmament.” (emphasis added) (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmhansrd/cm150120/debtext/150120-0001.htm#15012040000001)