Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, uses the jobs argument to stifle debate on Trident at the Labour conference, while promoting a trade union case for renewal (Blow to Corbyn as Labour delegates bar Trident vote, 28 September). The leader of a major union should be aware of the body of independent research that demonstrates how alternative public expenditure in civil industries, such as renewable energy, can generate far more employment than in an arms sector which continues to shed jobs. For example, BAE Systems, the leading UK arms manufacturer, and responsible for the construction of Trident submarines, has cut its UK workforce by 50,000 over the past 10 years.
Instead of representing the broader labour movement that has historically campaigned for internationalism and disarmament, the trade union leadership continues to peddle the jobs threat in a way that can only help prop up militarist arguments for Trident and the arms trade. Where are the union leaders of the calibre of Ron Todd, the former general secretary of the TGWU, who actively supported arms conversion and could articulate the benefits to working people from disarmament and alternative civil production for socially useful purposes?
Steven Schofield
Bradford
• I’m lost for words about your front-page headline on Trident. How can you get this so wrong? Delay on this thorny subject is the best possible thing. How is it that the Guardian is so out of touch with its readers over the Labour party at present? Please check this negative attitude and try to be a little more circumspect. Come on, catch up, modern up.
Judy Liebert
Nottingham
• Labour has been trying to shelve a debate on Trident for years and isn’t ready to have one now, so whatever lies behind the decision to take it off the conference agenda it’s good news.
Now for the long haul. There is nothing even slightly progressive about threatening genocide, which is all Trident is capable of doing. The notion that this monster somehow protects us, that we could ever actually use the infernal thing, is a quasi-religious delusion. Which is why it is so hard to bring its supporters to their senses. They are the true believers, untroubled by rational argument.
Corbyn now has the time to get Labour thinking sensibly about nuclear weapons, but he must change the language of the debate. “Unilateral disarmament” is a meaningless phrase to bandy about since the cold war ended, and assumes that Trident is a usable weapon, as opposed to political status symbol. Let’s try asking how many Glasgow-sized cities Britain, independently, needs to vaporise to guarantee its security? The current answer appears to be 192, being the number of warheads we deploy. As the world’s population has grown since we bought the system, we presumably need more now – let’s say 253, which implies six submarines rather than four. Help, we are only two-thirds as secure as we should be!
Such is the logic of strategic (ie city-vaporising) nuclear deployment. Here’s hoping team Corbyn can get us thinking straight. Scrap this ridiculous white elephant!
Richard Bradshaw
Hutton Rudby, North Yorkshire
• The choice between scrapping Trident and its costly renewal accepts the argument that it will simply stop working as a deterrent in the near future. This is nonsense. Trident was built in the UK and almost every part can be replaced. We have the drawings and all the information to do this for the indefinite future. If a number of missiles are no longer serviceable, does that matter? Will our enemies be emboldened by the thought that a diminished rain of missiles is threatened? Trident can be kept working for very many years until circumstances and public opinion are ready for renewal or abandonment. Trident is a perfect example of the military being keen to fight the last war, not the next. But if political pressures persist, then Trident can be continued at much smaller cost. Any engineer will tell you this is possible.
Craig Mackay
Cambridge
• Last week you reported that “it is not certain that all the unions would support unilateral nuclear disarmament” (Labour could face nuclear test in a conference Trident vote next week, 23 September). It may help Jeremy Corbyn and the huge numbers of us who support his opposition to Trident to recall the Lucas Aerospace affair of 1976 when trade union members, threatened with redundancy, came up with a range of creative and socially useful ideas for production in place of the company’s main business of armaments. The details have often been recalled in the Guardian – see, eg, Anne Karpf’s article (A utopia we nearly had, 1 February 2012) and the letters that you published afterwards (6 February 2012).
Peter Lewis
London
