David Cameron is expected to hold a vote on the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent later this month in an attempt to reunify his Brexit-scarred party and underscore the divisions in Labour, sources have said.
MPs were expected to be asked on 18 July to confirm that construction of all four submarines needed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrent should go ahead, Whitehall sources said on Thursday.
Theresa May, the frontrunner to replace Cameron as the Tory leader and prime minister, said earlier this week that a vote should be held before parliament rises for its summer recess on 21 July. The home secretary said it would be “sheer madness” to abandon the deterrent.
While the Conservatives are largely united on the issue of Trident renewal, and will not need Labour support, putting the issue to a vote in the House of Commons could plunge Labour into a fresh round of infighting.
Defence, and in particular the future of Trident, is one of the key policy areas which divides the embattled Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, from many of his MPs. He is expected to offer MPs a free vote on Trident, arguing that the ongoing review of foreign policy by his shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, means the party has no fixed position.
But Trident backers – including John Woodcock, whose Barrow constituency is home to the shipyard where the new submarines will be built – insist the party’s official policy remains to back renewal. “We voted on it at conference last year,” he said.
Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, who is currently involved in talks with Corbyn about how to prevent the party descending into civil war, is a strong supporter of Trident. Other trades unions that are key backers of Corbyn, including the GMB, are also in favour of Trident renewal.
It emerged on Thursday that rebel MPs were holding off challenging Corbyn for the party’s leadership to allow those talks to continue over the weekend – although Corbyn travelled to Paris on Thursday for a meeting of European socialists, and will attend the Durham miner’s gala on Saturday.
Owen Smith, the former shadow work and pensions secretary who had been known to be gathering Labour MPs’ signatures to support a leadership run, released a statement on Thursday saying he would not launch a challenge while the talks were going on.
“Yesterday, I spoke directly with Len McCluskey of Unite and met with our leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to explore what I can do to try and heal the rifts that have opened up in our movement.”
He said Corbyn had reassured him during their 45-minute meeting that he was “engaging in talks with an open mind”.
Smith added: “I believe that all of us whose priority is to restore unity in the Labour movement and give us a chance to defeat our only true enemy, the Tories, should give these talks every chance to succeed. That is what I intend to do and I urge all my colleagues to do likewise.”
That makes it hard for Angela Eagle, the former shadow business secretary who had previously announced that she was preparing to challenge Corbyn, to take any action before the weekend.
However, Eagle’s backers have insisted she has more signatures than the 20% of the parliamentary party needed to launch a challenge, and is in a “holding pattern”, ready to launch a bid if Corbyn refuses to step down.
While Smith is seen by some as more likely to be able to reunite the party by winning over leftwingers, a source close to the leadership said: “If Owen runs he’d be our party’s Michael Gove, an attention-seeking turncoat. Plus the last time we had a Labour leader from Wales who betrayed the left we went on to lose another two elections.”
Watson is said to be keen to have more time to try to persuade Corbyn that his position has become untenable, after scores of resignations from the shadow frontbench.
Unless Corbyn agrees to step aside – which his allies insist he has no intention of doing – there is likely to be a battle inside the party, and potentially through the courts, about whether his name would automatically have to be included on any leadership ballot paper.
While the crisis has been rolling on, the number of Labour supporters has grown rapidly, with up to 100,000 signing up since the Brexit vote, according to party sources.
The Keep Corbyn campaign, coordinated by the grassroots group Momentum, has said it believes the bulk of new members would back Corbyn in a challenge; but a rival Saving Labour campaign has been signing up members of the public who want him to stand down.
The prominent backbencher and Labour MP for Aberavon, Stephen Kinnock, said the referendum result meant Labour needed “a persuader, not a protester”, to hold the Conservative government to account through the tough negotiations with the rest of the EU that will lie ahead.
- This article was amended on 8 July 2016. It originally stated that the Unite leader Len McCluskey is a “strong supporter” of Trident. This is not correct. McCluskey and Unite support members who work in the industry but also call on the UK government to lead international nuclear disarmament talks.
