IT IS tempting to think that Gordon Brown is at last listening to Tribune over Trident. The announcement of the trimming back of the nuclear stockpile might at first site look like the first step on a long road to abandoning Trident altogether. Even critics such as Nigel Griffiths, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South who resigned in protest as a Government aide over the decision to renew Trident in 2007, hailed it as a significant step to “a safer and eventually nuclear-weapon free world”. We can only hope that it may be.
The more immediate reality is that even after the 50 per cent reduction in warheads since 1997, Britain still has 160 ready to be deployed, the Government persists in wasting tens of billions of pounds on a programme to build four new nuclear submarines and in taking part in the American programme to extend the life of the Trident D5 missile, against the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.
Cuts are a welcome gesture, although it is misguided to invest too much hope that Iran will see such a gesture as sufficient to curtail development of its own nuclear weapon since its argument is about the ownership by the west of any nuclear weapons at all. The message that Mr Brown is sending out is welcome, all the more so if it chimes with new thinking in Washington.
However, in terms of the global nuclear stand-off, nothing has changed. Except that, on the same day as Mr Brown’s announcement, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced plans to boost both conventional and nuclear forces to match what he called a growing threat from Nato. As Marcus Papadopoulos reports on page 7, there are grounds for concern about insider Washington thinking on the development of Nato and the recent development of strategy in relation to Russia offers prima facie evidence that Moscow may well have grounds for concern.
Medvedev’s remarks come just two weeks before his first meeting with Barack Obama at the G20 in London and a touch of global grandstanding would be no surprise at this stage. President Obama’s message that America wants to “reset” the relationship with Russia has met with mixed signals from the Kremlin, concerned as it is with what it sees as the west’s creeping encroachment, driven by Nato, into its comfort zones, such as Ukraine and Georgia. In this climate, Mr Brown is right to talk about arms reductions and attempt to influence both the United States and Russia while simultaneously sending a message to regimes seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
But there is only one message that will have any real effect and that is: Scrap Trident.
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GORDON BROWN’s reported call for a major review of the Labour Party (see page 4) requires urgent clarification. There is a serious need for a complete overhaul of the party’s campaigning techniques and there are undoubtedly lessons to be learned from Barack Obama’s “people-powered” techniques. The last local elections and most recent parliamentary by-elections have seen lamentable efforts and poor turnouts of canvassers.
On the road to winning the American presidency, Mr Obama also raised significant amounts of cash for campaigning – a lesson Labour might well want to take on board. But Mr Brown and the party leadership should beware of trailing too far on President Obama’s Democrat tailcoat. There is another American-inspired set of ideas about to be produced which would rip the Labour Party apart and start again with a less rigid “command-and-control” structure and open participation with no membership fees.
So far, so hippie. The ideas, contained in a Fabian pamphlet to be published soon, for which Mr Brown has penned a foreword, would indeed revolutionise the party of labour. It would marginalise any organised voice of the unions for a start. And it would abandon the traditional constitutional democratic blocks which provide the activist membership with the only leverage over policy and its implementation in power.
The review into how Mr Brown’s recent attempt to reform the decision-making process is due to begin soon. We should see how that is working first. And if Mr Brown is thinking of election-winning reforms he should not be looking at reinventing his party but his Government.
