Tory security chaos over EU referendum debate

The EU referendum campaign is bound to throw up many contradictions in Tory ministers' policy differences. Here is a worrying one that has emerged early.

David Cameron has asserted being inside the EU is better for our (national) security; defence secretary Michael Fallon, who used to be a euro-sceptic, echoes this, arguing, in  an interview published in the Sunday Telegraph (21 Feb. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12166767/Strength-in-numbers-Michael-Fallon-backs-staying-with-Europe.html) if we left the EU, for the first time in its history "it would be smaller and weaker."

Meantime, home secretary Theresa May, as come out in favour of staying in the EU on security grounds to better fight terrorism, having previously waivered; yet her own departmental colleague, John Hayes, who is the security minister, is backing Brexit!

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was called a national security risk by Mr Cameron shortly after his election victory. At Home Office questions on Monday in Parliament, Mr Corbyn's shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, challenged Mrs May over her cabinet colleague, work and pensions secretary , Iain Duncan Smith (himself a former Tory leader) who said on Sunday terrorist attacks such has happened in Paris last year are less likly if the UK leaves the EU, as Britain's borders will be more effectively policed outside the borderless EU

 

What are the voters preparing to decide how to vote  in the EU referendum supposed to make of this Tory security chaos?

EDF nuclear meltdown- one graph is worth a thousand words

 

 

energydesk.greenpeace.org February 16, 2016

 

Why did UK boycott nuclear disarmament negotiations this week?

Letter to London Evening Standard:


Your news report "Corbyn at odds with voters over his policy on nuclear deterrent, new poll reveals," and accompanying leading article "Voters' clear message to Labour on Trident" (28 January) both mislead your readers.

The opinion poll question does not assess the support for negotiated - so-called multilateral - nuclear disarmament which is the regular default position of the pro-Trident re-armers, which includes the Prime Minister, Defence Secretary and shadow foreign secretary,

Voters in the 1964 General Election, at the height of the Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union, elected the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson that stood on a Manifesto platform that asserted boldly: " We are against the development of national nuclear deterrents."

Wilson’s Government subsequently backtracked on this commitment because the unelected  Royal Navy top brass convinced him - despite Defence Secretary Denis  Healey’s misgivings - that  development of the Polaris nuclear submarine system, the forerunner of Trident “had  passed the point of no return” according to a brilliant new account of the decision by London University historian, Professor Peter Hennessy in his new book The Silent Deep: the Royal Submarine Service since 1945 (page 242)

So Mr Corbyn needs to argue the case for negotiated nuclear disarmament over the next four years, not passively accept that some opinion polls suggest the voters currently don’t agree.

Ironically, on the very day your ran the report on this opinion poll, the United Nations hosted in Geneva  the first  multilateral open-ended working group (OEWG) on nuclear disarmament to address concrete effective legal measures, legal provisions, and norms that will need to be concluded to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons.

(www.unog.ch/oewg-ndn)

The United Kingdom boycotted this multilateral forum. Why could that be?

Killing our own with polonium contamination

The media today have  been shocked at the exposure of details of the Russian Government's apparent murder of one of its own former spooks, Alexander Litvinenko,  by radioactive polonium poisoning
They may also be shocked that in the early years of developing the predecessor to the Trident nuclear WMD, our nuclear boffins  had a terrible accident at Sellafield ( then called Windscale) when trying to produce  polonium - by irradiating bismuth oxide cartridges - in the iconic Windscale piles, resulting in the widespread polonium contamination of north west England in October 1957.
The official history of the accident, by the late Lorna Arnold,  ( published in 1992), revealed ( at page 97) that following the accident polonium pollution was detected within days in northern Europe. Samples were collected in Copenhagen, Oslo, Bonn, and The Hague and analysed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority  scientists at Harwell  near Oxford.
A paper revealing this was published, ironically considering the purpose of Sellafield in the atomic bomb programme, by Dr John Dunster, chief health physicist for UKAEA at Sellafield, at the United Nations' Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy conference in Geneva, in 1958. Perhaps it was to smokescreen the real military nuclear materials production purposes of the Windscale piles.

Later medical analysis by the Medical Research Council suggested around 33 additional deaths could have resulted from this uncontrolled release of polonium across the country

As a BBC documentary  aired in  2007 suggested " "No-one died in the fire but despite what the UKAEA said in 1957 about there being no risk to human health, it's now widely accepted that some deaths in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, could have been caused by the release of the radioactivity. But the figures vary depending on which study you look at. Some have suggested 30, others around 100 and some well over that. Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at Lancaster University says the deaths are what are known as statistical deaths i.e not actual named people and it will be always difficult to prove whether any one person died as a direct result of an incident like the fire."

 "The view from outside Windscale in 1957". BBC 2 October 2007
So it is not only the Russians that have  had problems with dangerous polonium.

UK should have positive role in nuclear disarmament‏

 Letter sent to The Times:

Alice Thomson makes a compelling case for nuclear disarmament, especially considering her grandfather’s pioneering  role in developing atomic weapons (“Maybe Corbyn’s right about scrapping Trident,” 20 January; http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4669492.ece). However, I disagree with her caveat that “Britain’s UN security council seat could be in jeopardy if the country became nuclear-lite.”  

In late October last year, states at the United Nations in New York decided to hold an open-ended working group (OEWG) on nuclear disarmament to address concrete effective legal measures, legal provisions, and norms that will need to be concluded to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons. It will operate as a subsidiary body of the General Assembly. (http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/OEWG/2016/Documents/OEWG_Invitation28Jan.pdf)

Resolution 70/33 entitled “Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations”, was subsequently adopted by the General Assembly on 7 December 2015. It builds upon the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament, held on 26 September 2013.

The first meeting of this OEWG in 2016 will be held in Geneva on 28 January, (www.unog.ch/oewg-ndn), to which interested non-governmental organizations are invited to participate.

Last month Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer asked the Government about its voting on the resolutions promoting this multilateral nuclear disarmament process, to be told by Foreign Office minister Baroness Anelay of St Johns that: “Lords

 

“At the UN First Committee in November, the UK voted against the Resolutions “L13 Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations” and “L37 Humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons” (Written answer HL4165, 10 December 2015)

 

In a Parliamentary answer to Labour backbench veteran MP Paul Flynn by another Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood on19 January, the minister asserted: “The UK has a strong record on nuclear disarmament.”

 

Yet it refuses to take part in the very multilateral nuclear disarmament forum established at the UN while the UK held the chair of the UN security council.

 

I believe  the UK would be hugely appreciated as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council by the 190 odd other UN non- nuclear states if it began real steps towards nuclear disarmament.

Nuclear WMD confusion

Letter sent to The Guardian:

I am very pleased Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has opened a wide-ranging debate in the Labour Party over nuclear WMDs, andI share his opposition to these deadly weapons. But I think he is misguided in  proposing going ahead with building the missile-carrying nuclear-powered submarines as replacement for Trident, but deploying them without any arms. (“Corbyn proposes third way on Trident,” 18 January; http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/17/labours-defence-policy-review-given-third-option-for-trident-stance)

This would be a massively expensive make-work programme for the existing and future workforces at Barrow shipyard, and the manufacturing supply chain, serving no purpose other than appeasing his trades union backers, who themselves, after decades resisting defence diversification, ought now to wake up to its merits for their members.

Your security expert Richard Norton-Taylor is correct to point out the ship-building expertise of the Barrow workforce could be much better deployed in building surface ships and perhaps conventionally powered -and-armed submarines.

In my personal submission to the Government’s Defence and Security Review last year, I argued the main security threat facing the UK this century will come from climate change-enforced mass migrations of populations from regions hotting-up and chronically losing water supplies.

I proposed building dual-purpose surface ships for the Royal Navy, to permit evacuations, medical care and emergency aid to these stricken populations, or else face a growing refugee threat that makes the current one from Syria and Libya look like a tea party.

Also, shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry is totally misinformed if she thinks  Japan has the capability to build and deploy a nuclear weapon. (same report, 18 Jan) As a lawyer, she should be aware Japan has a constitutional prohibition against owning, development or deployment of nuclear weapons.

Additionally, Japan has never tested a nuclear weapon, and could not deploy one untested, however smart the designers- in- the- basement.

I think Mr Corbyn should take encouragement  from Labour’s election-winning 1964 manifesto, the New Britain, which asserted

“We are against the development of national nuclear deterrents.”

So am I.

How to win elections on a nuclear disarmament platform: Labour in 1964

LABOUR MANIFESTO 1964

"THE NEW BRITAIN"

http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab64.htm

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The world wants it and would welcome it. The British people want it, deserve it and urgently need it. And now, at last, the general election presents us with the exciting prospect of achieving it. The dying months of a frustrating 1964 can be transformed into the launching platform for the New Britain of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
A New Britain - mobilising the resources of technology under a national plan; harnessing our national wealth in brains, our genius for scientific invention and medical discovery; reversing the decline of the thirteen wasted years; affording a new opportunity to equal, and if possible surpass, the roaring progress of other western powers while Tory Britain has moved sideways, backwards but seldom forward. The country needs fresh and virile leadership. Labour is ready. Poised to swing its plans into instant operation. Impatient to apply the "new thinking" that will end the chaos and sterility. Here is Labour's Manifesto for the 1964 election, restless with positive remedies for the problems the Tories have criminally neglected.


DEFENCE POLICY
The Labour Party will ensure that Britain is adequately defended. This is manifestly not the position today. In 13 years, the Conservatives have spent £20,000 m. and our defences are weaker than at almost any time in our history. Flagrant waste on missile and other projects has diverted funds and resources from urgently needed defence projects. This is one reason for their failure to obtain on a voluntary, regular basis the required numbers in the Army, to modernise their obsolescent equipment and to give them the long-range mobility needed for our commitments, particularly to the Commonwealth. Mr. Macmillan's decision in 1957 to stake his all on Blue Streak, followed by further costly expenditure on Skybolt and now Polaris, has meant that the Navy too has been run down to a dangerously low level, and is now pathetically inadequate in numbers of ships in commission, in manning and in the most modern types such as nuclear-powered tracker submarines. Many thousands of millions have been spent on the aircraft industry, but because of lurches in strategic policy, wrong priorities, and grave errors in the choice of aircraft, we are now in a position where obsolete types have not been replaced, and for such urgently needed machines as helicopters (which could make a great contribution to the security and effectiveness of our troops in Malaysia) we are dependent on the United States. Tory Nuclear Pretence The Nassau agreement to buy Polaris know-how and Polaris missiles from the U.S.A. will add nothing to the deterrent strength of the western alliance, and it will mean utter dependence on the U.S. for their supply. Nor is it true that all this costly defence expenditure will produce an "independent British deterrent". It will not be independent and it will not be British and it will not deter. Its possession will impress neither friend nor potential foe. Moreover, Britain's insistence on this nuclear pretence carries with it grave dangers of encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons to countries not possessing them, including Germany. The Government bases its policy on the assumption that Britain must be prepared to go it alone without her allies in an all-out thermo-nuclear war with the Soviet Union, involving the obliteration of our people. By constantly reiterating this appalling assumption the Government is undermining the alliance on which our security now depends.




Labour's New Approach
A Labour Government's first concern will be to put our defences on a sound basis and to ensure that the nation gets value for money on its overseas expenditure. In this field, any government has a clear responsibility to ensure the security of its own people and the fulfilment of its obligations to other nations. As a first step, we shall submit the whole area of weapons supply to a searching re-examination in order to ensure that the limited sums available are spent on those weapons best designed to carry out our policies and fulfil our obligations. We are not prepared any longer to waste the country's resources on endless duplication of strategic nuclear weapons. We shall propose the re-negotiation of the Nassau agreement. Our stress will be on the strengthening of our conventional regular forces so that we can contribute our share to Nato defence and also fulfil our peacekeeping commitments to the Commonwealth and the United Nations. We are against the development of national nuclear deterrents and oppose the current American proposal for a new mixed-manned nuclear surface fleet (MLF). We believe in the inter-dependence of the western alliance and will put forward constructive proposals for integrating all Nato's nuclear weapons under effective political control so that all the partners in the alliance have a proper share in their deployment and control. We do not delude ourselves that the tasks ahead will be easy to accomplish. Even now we do not know the full extent of the damage we shall have to repair after 13 wasted years of Conservative government. The essential conditions for success are, however, clear.