 My Labour opponent has obviously decided that he believes there is some kind of dividing line between the Labour Party and the Conservatives on the nuclear deterrent issue. To my knowledge, and I may have missed something here, he very rarely talks about anything else other than the supposed threats of a Conservative Government to the shipyard.
I have repeatedly offered him the opportunity to stop doing this because it is an artificial debate but he continues doing so. He was at it again yesterday on the Politics Show, and afterwards, repeating his line about how bad it would be under the Tories and completely refusing to acknowledge or debate the facts of the situation when I answered his charges.
I don’t know about everyone else but I am getting tired of this type of sterile non debate but I thought it useful to set out the various claims he has made, as well as reiterating the facts of the situation:
- Mr Woodcock started his campaign by implying that the Conservatives would not go ahead with the Trident replacement but would seek to extend the life of the existing Vanguard boats. I published a letter on 25th September 2009 explaining this was disingenuous and was not the case. He seems to have taken this on board to an extent because now he is talking of a five year delay, so he obviously now accepts he was wrong.
- He claims it was only because of the Labour Government that the successor programme is going ahead. Well, yes to an extent, the 2007 vote was brought forward by the Labour Government but it was actually only passed because the Conservatives supported it against a large Labour rebellion (I’ll dig out the voting record from Hansard one day and publish it the blog). Also, we were, and still are, not the Government so we have hardly brought this vote forward ourselves.
- He claims only the Labour Party have excluded the nuclear deterrent from the Strategic Defence Review. This is just not true; the Conservatives were calling for a SDR for some time before Labour decided to adopt this position also. We have always excluded the nuclear deterrent from the SDR, for example on 8th October 2009 Liam Fox told the Conservative Party conference:
“But some things cannot change. In a world where unpredictable and rogue states are developing nuclear weapons it would be indefensible for Britain to give up its minimum nuclear deterrent. We cannot know what risks we might face in the future.
That is why a future Conservative government will never leave this country open to nuclear blackmail and we will guarantee a round the clock, submarine based nuclear deterrent for as long as it is needed.”
- On 19th January he claimed it was ‘appalling that anyone who says they can be trusted to stand up for Furness should champion this crazy plan’ when I pointed out that the UK successor programme had already been delayed because of the need to align our programme with the US and also finalise the propulsion arrangements for the new submarines. These are facts, it isn’t crazy to point them out, it is just honest. Just what exactly is he proposing, that we build the submarines before the design is finalised or we have designed and built the propulsion unit? He has no answer to this and seems to imply that the two programmes can run to some kind of artificial timetable independent of reality.
- He claims that the number of jobs in the yard is going up despite the latest redundancies (a classic example of 1984 double speak!) and that he hopes most of these redundancies will be redeployed. This may be the case, and I hope it is the case that as many staff as possible can be retrained for different jobs to fill vacancies. However, if they do this then there isn’t a vacancy so the net effect is that Barrow has lost 230 positions, so someone who may have hoped to apply for one of these vacancies now can’t. Jobs may increase in the future, but at the moment they are going down, again a simple fact.
- He has never acknowledged the fact that the job losses are a direct consequence of the Labour Government’s decision to slow down the ‘Astute’ timetable. On 15th December, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported that boats 2-4 are being delayed and the order for boats 5-7 deferred. They say that on average boats 2-7 will be nine months late, which is, in total a 54 month or 4.5 year delay (NAO Report: Defence Major Projects HC 85I- 2009/10 Page 25 section 2.7 & 2.8). Why can’t he just be honest and acknowledge this?
There are many areas where there is a difference between the Labour and the Conservative approach, we want to cut the deficit quicker and start next year, Labour does not. We want to maintain NHS spending because of the demographic challenges we face, Labour do not. These are but two examples upon which we have a different view and we could have a proper debate.
On the issue of the nuclear deterrent, is there a real difference? Of course I would doubt their real commitment to actually following through on their pledge, and I would point out that we have a proven track record of doing so, for example, we built the current Vanguard boats when they opposed it and we put 18 orders through the Barrow yard from 1979 to 1997 compared to Labour ordering 1 submarine in 13 years. It is easy to promise, but as many have found out under Labour, a lot harder to deliver.
We do have some differences on other defence issues we could debate, but as far as the deterrent is concerned I am at a loss to understand why Mr Woodcock wishes to create an artificial dividing line when one does not really exist.
Still, as long as he keeps throwing them, I’ll keep hitting them!
PS. I like the way this is reported in the NWEM, it says we had a row on TV, I must have missed it because it didn’t seem like a row to me. He was asked a question and gave a response, I was asked to respond and I did. What exactly were we supposed to do?
Why don’t you watch the piece on the BBC i-player for yourself and decide if it was a row or not. The link to the BBC i-player is here, the ‘row’ is 39 minutes into the programme:
Link to the NWEM story:
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