You report (Labour to state ‘non-negotiable’ support for UK’s nuclear weapons, 25 February) that the shadow defence secretary, John Healey, says his party’s commitment to nuclear weapons is “non-negotiable”, seemingly taking a harder line even than successive Conservative governments, which have at least supported talks on multilateral nuclear disarmament.
The new Labour leadership in its rhetoric seems more frightened of being accused at home of being weak on defence than a nuclear attack by a foreign power. For years, Whitehall analysts have considered a pandemic more likely than any real threat of a nuclear attack. Yet for years, ministers and opposition frontbenchers ignored the former while exaggerating the latter. Trade union leaders, meanwhile, back a new Trident missile programme and spending more than £200bn on unusable weapons, citing the need to preserve highly skilled jobs. Yet Britain has had to bank on French engineers for civil nuclear power stations of which Britain now appears to be in dire need.
Richard Norton-Taylor
London
• John Healey thinks that Labour’s support for the UK’s nuclear deterrent is non-negotiable, and also that Labour’s commitment to international law and universal human rights is total. So if Trident is kept the UK’s 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament negotiations can be ignored for a few more decades. And the international court of justice’s decision in 1996 that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international and humanitarian law can also be ignored. What is important for John Healey is to pursue contradictory policies that he thinks are popular.
Jim Pragnell
Binfield, Berkshire
• I can’t imagine I was alone in doing a double take on reading this report. In former times, one might have hoped for a rejoinder in the form of “Scrap Trident – Benn”. Sadly, for those of us who oppose this immoral, extravagant and yet futile weapons system, no such Healey/Benn division operates today.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London
