Trident Alternatives Review

Part of Business of the House – in the House of Commons at 8:42 pm on 17 July 2013.

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Photo of John Woodcock John Woodcock Labour, Barrow and Furness 8:42, 17 July 2013

I would describe it as a complete collapse in the Liberal Democrats’ position. Two years on, we have a taxpayer-funded document—how much did this process cost the taxpayer, by the way? The document basically confirms what we duped fools have been arguing for years—that unless people show their true colours and come out as unilateral disarmers, and in doing so advocate a path that we strongly believe would make the horror of a nuclear war more likely, there is no credible, cost-effective alternative to the fundamentals of the existing plan to replace our fleet of deterrent submarines.

The alternative review rejects as unworkable and even more expensive what had long been the Liberal Democrats’ preferred option—some sort of mini-deterrent. Then the fall-back plan of halving the number of replacement Vanguard submarines to two, fervently briefed to the newspapers over the weekend, turns out not to have been considered by the review at all. Would anyone like to explain this? Have Liberal Democrats realised that every idea they have put forward so far has collapsed under scrutiny? Did they come to a view that it was best not to test this one in the official review, lest those pesky facts and figures ruin it like all the others?