Trident: The Only 2006 Huhne Policy Left Undone October 28, 2007
Posted by richardhuzzey in Uncategorized.trackback
Is Chris a new convert on opposing Trident replacement? No – we have the newspaper quotes below. Hywel asks on this site what Chris said in the 2006 leadership election on the issue. In the 2006 campaign, Chris majored on four big policy ideas.
The first was a green tax switch, which the party later adopted. The next was that troops in Iraq were part of the problem, not solution, and should be withdrawn. Ming came to the same conclusion, and made it party policy. Thirdly, Huhne called for a Freedom Bill to repeal attacks on civil liberties. Nick Clegg has very ably marketed this since then as part of our Home Affairs brief. But the one central idea of Chris’s 2006 campaign which his colleagues did not back as party policy was Trident.
Here are Chris’s comments from 2006:
Mr Huhne will now start campaigning with a call for the government not to recommission Trident, a position neither Sir Menzies nor Simon Hughes are so far willing to endorse.
Guardian Unlimited, January 27, 2006
Mr Huhne, who only became an MP eight months ago, began the leadership race as a rank outsider who was little known beyond Liberal Democrat circles. But today’s YouGov poll suggests his ticket of green taxes, pulling troops out of Iraq and no to replacing Trident has struck a chord with the 73,000 party members.
Evening Standard (London), February 9, 2006
In the interview Mr Huhne also called for British troops to be pulled out of Iraq this year. “I think we need a very clear timetable,” he said.”My hunch at the moment is the end of this year is do-able.” He also outlined his opposition to renewing Trident saying Britain needed something “more in tune” with the threats it faced today.
Press Association, January 22, 2006
[Chris Huhne] is running to the Left of Sir Menzies Campbell, the early favourite, with pledges to withdraw abruptly from Iraq and ruling out support for Trident – both touchstone issues for the Left of the Lib-Dems.
The Evening Standard (London), February 23, 2006
In June of 2006, Chris was one of those who pushed for a full parliamentary vote:
As well as the “usual suspects” of the lefwing Campaign Group, it includes new intake Labour MPs such as Emily Thornberry and Mary Creagh, and Liberal Democrats such as Chris Huhne. The simmering debate over Trident was set ablaze last night by the chancellor in a speech in the City of London, where he tacitly signalled his support for replacing the ageing Trident missile system.
Guardian Unlimited, June 22 2006
From this distance it looks to me as if Chris is taking an approach pretty close to that advocated by the Oxford Research Group in its August 2006 paper “Replacing Trident: who will make the decisons and how”
Summary ORG blurb page ends by saying:
“The paper concludes by arguing that the British government should take the opportunity afforded by forthcoming nuclear weapons decisions to conduct a full review of Britain’s strategic security policy. This should examine the difficult subjects of the nature of the UK’s relationship with the US and what role, if any, nuclear weapons have in securing Britain’s foreign and defence policy goals. Finally the paper argues that advocacy organisations must also place the post-Vanguard debate in this wider context. It suggests that ideological ant-nuclear arguments will have little or no impact in Whitehall and that the most productive and pragmatic approach may be to argue forcefully for a much reduced and cheaper post-Vanguard nuclear capability to reflect the vastly diminished role of nuclear weapons in Britain’s defence posture since the end of the Cold War.”
The point being that if Trident opponents rely on traditional moral arguments they will simply not be listened to as all of these have already been discounted. However there are very considerable disagreements in the official position and these give an opportunity for propery framed argumenst to make an impact.
http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/tridentdm.php
Taking this forward, the ORGS July 2007 monthly security briefing commented:
” …the Brown government inherited a defence posture in which the Trident replacement decision had already been made, and the carrier decision was imminent. It might have been wiser for the incoming government to put both decisions on hold pending a full re-evaluation of British security policy. This would have gone far beyond traditional defence reviews to consider precisely the kinds of major global trends that will most affect security in the coming decades. Such a review might still be possible, but it will certainly not be considered by a Brown government before a general election. From Labour’s political perspective, and its history of being seen as weak on defence, a pre-election period is not the time for a fundamental reassessment of UK security policy. That is a really unfortunate matter of timing, but neither the Trident replacement or aircraft carrier decisions are set in stone… ”
http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/monthly_briefings/2007/08/mixed-messages-from-brown-government.html
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