The Labour Party manifesto was officially launched today. Before I start my review of it I strongly urge you to read through it for yourself.
I'm writing this review because I think it's important to raise certain issues about it in order to broaden the discussion, but please don't just rely on what I say, or what anyone else says about it.
Make sure that you read it for yourself, and think about it for yourself.
The good
The 2017 Labour Party manifesto is absolutely full of good positive ideas for making Britain a better, fairer and more prosperous place. I'm going to briefly run through some of the aspects that I find the most impressive.
• NHS - Labour founded the NHS in 1948 and they are the natural guardians of our health service. They have pledged to reverse the savage Tory funding cuts, to give our hard-working medical staff a long-overdue pay rise, to halt the secret Tory plans to close dozens more NHS facilities after the election, to ensure safe staffing levels in all hospitals, to reinstate the waiting time targets that the Tories scrapped because they were failing to meet them, and to begin reversing the ongoing Tory NHS-privatisation agenda.
• Education - Labour are planning to set up a National Education Service to provide education and retraining that is free at the point of need from cradle to grave. It's a fantastic policy that would be of enormous benefit to the economy. In the modern economy jobs arise and become obsolete faster than ever, meaning that a prosperous nation needs a flexible workforce that can be quickly and efficiently retrained with new skills so people are out of work and economically inactive for as little time as possible.
• Ending George Osborne's ruinous austerity agenda - George Osborne has quit parliament to spend time with his other jobs, but his socially and economically ruinous austerity agenda lives on. Theresa May and her Chancellor Philip Hammond have demonstrated their intention to continue talking in the same kind of desperately misleading pseudo-economic platitudes as Cameron and Osborne did before them. After seven punishing years of austerity the UK economy has flat-lined. The average wage is still below the 2007 level; private debt has soared back up to pre-crisis levels; the police, army, emergency services and local government have all been slashed to the bone ... And for what? The Tories promised that austerity would have eliminated the budget deficit by May 2015, yet it was still a mind-boggling £51.7 billion in 2016-2017 and they now openly admit they won't be eliminating it any time before 2021. Austerity has failed in its own terms and it's well beyond the time to bin it.
• Investment - Labour plan to abandon ideological austerity and replace it with an investment led recovery. This kind of approach works by targeting spending on infrastructure and services that generate more economic returns than the investment costs. To give a simplified hypothetical example - a new rail link that costs several hundred million to build, but which knocks half an hour off the commute of some 50,000 passengers per day and attracts several big businesses to set up operations in the area. Building the rail link obviously costs more up-front than investing nothing, but over the long-term it pays back many times the original investment cost. Labour's plan to establish a National Investment Bank to manage this programme of investments is a really good idea. If diverse countries like Norway, the United States, China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Russia and Qatar can all have successful sovereign wealth/investment funds, then why shouldn't the UK?
• Workers' rights and wages - After seven long years of the Tories eroding workers' rights and overseeing the worst slump in the value of workers' wages in recorded history, Labour want to reverse the trend. Scrapping the £1,200 tribunal fees; introducing a £10 minimum wage by 2020; introducing fair pay scales at companies carrying out government contracts; ending the below-inflation wage cap on public sector salaries; and banning exploitative Zero Hour Contracts are all good moves that would put more power in workers' hands, and more money in workers' pockets.
• Housing - The Tories have provoked a devastating housing crisis. Theresa May has admitted that the Tories oversaw the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s. They also increased demand for housing by allowing in the biggest immigration wave the UK has ever seen. As a result house prices have skyrocketed to their most unaffordable levels ever. Labour would begin reversing this trend by building 200,000 new houses a year, half of them council houses (a sound government investment that pays back more in the long-term than the initial investment cost). For those who still can't afford to buy, Labour are intent on defending private renters from exploitative buy-to-let slumlords with a new set of tenants' rights.
• Repatriation of UK infrastructure - For almost four decades UK governments have adhered to fanatical hard-right economic dogma that has seen countless £billions in public assets flogged off on the cheap, and eventually ending up as the property of foreign governments. Examples include the UK's nuclear power stations (which now belong to the French government) the UK's rail services (74% of UK rail franchises are now run by foreign governments' state rail operators), the UK National Grid (now owned by China and Qatar) the UK's water supply (two of the biggest investors in Thames Water are China and the United Arab Emirates). Bizarrely the Tories believe that the only country that should be barred from owning UK infrastructure is the UK itself. Labour want to repatriate some of the UK's most strategically vital natural monopolies by renationalising them. Anyone who opposes this is clearly demonstrating that they're so politically confused that they think it's perfectly fine for communist China to own chunks of UK infrastructure, but some kind of terrible communist plot to say that the UK should actually own its own infrastructure!
• Immigration - Instead of following Theresa May's immigration model of picking an arbitrary number out of the air (100,000), spectacularly failing to meet it, then recycling the exact same arbitrary number again in 2015 and failing to meet it again, and recycling it yet again in 2017 - Labour are intent on developing a rational immigration policy that allows immigration where there are skills shortages; clamps down on harmful practices like gangmastering, undercutting, and exclusive overseas recruitment; and recognises the distinctions between different types of migration (long-term labour, short-term labour, family migration, international students ...).
• Localisation and democracy - In my view localisation is key to a well functioning democracy. The more say local people have over local issues, the more democratic the society. Over the last seven years the Tories have severely undermined local government with their huge funding cuts and their privatisation agenda, which has resulted in more and more power being centralised in Westminster, or being distributed to unaccountable private interests. Labour's manifesto aims to put more power into local people's hands, and to make the UK more democratic through a constitutional convention.
The bad
There are things in the 2017 Labour manifesto that I don't fully agree with, and a few that I outright disagree with.
The title
One thing I don't particularly like is the title on the cover illustration. "For the Many, not the few" is catchy enough I suppose, but it comes across as a bit divisive to me.
It seems to suggest that Labour's policies would do nothing for the rich, when a lot of their policies actually would benefit the rich: Investment in infrastructure spending would provide opportunities to big businesses like engineering companies ... More money in people's pockets would mean more demand in the economy, which would create new opportunities for existing businesses and wealthy entrepreneurs ... Labour's house building programme would create a boom for owners of engineering firms, construction companies, manufacturers and builders merchants ... A fair tax policy would actually benefit business owners who pay their fair share of tax by stopping HMRC from doing sweetheart deals with major corporations so that they can undercut legitimate businesses ... Labour's focus on the creative industries would help create opportunities for many to become the wealthy musicians, artists, actors and directors of the future.
In my view "For the many, not just the few" would have been better, but I guess it's a fairly trivial semantic point.
Schools
Labour should have pledged to return as many privatised academy schools to public ownership as possible, and made it absolutely clear that academy chains and free schools that rely on public funds will be subject to Freedom of Information legislation and the 20:1 pay ratio, so that they can't keep topslicing huge salaries out of our children's education budgets with impunity.
if it was up to me I'd go much further. I'd give them the option of either handing the schools back to the local authorities, or reducing the executive pay to no higher than the highest paid teacher at any of their schools. The idea of academy chain bosses topslicing £400,000+ a year salaries for themselves out of our children's education budgets is absolutely sickening.
The fiasco at Perry Beeches should have been a wake up call to the nation of how bad the Tory vandalism of the education has been. The opposition under Miliband was woeful (the dreadful Tristram Hunt just sat on his hands and did nothing for years). Labour could, and should, do a lot better on opposing these parasitical and unaccountable academy chains.
Brexit
I think the Labour Brexit stance is way better than the Tories bonkers "negotiating strategy" of issuing ever escalating threats and paranoid Daily Mail style conspiracy theories, but it's basically sprinkling glitter on a turd and describing it as a birthday cake. I can't actually see any way the UK can avoid the Brexit disaster now, but at least the Labour approach would prioritise the protection of jobs and the economy, instead of playing the incredibly reckless and antagonistic game of diplomatic brinkmanship Theresa May is clearly intent on.
Trident
I think Trident is a moral abomination and massive waste of money. I agree with the military experts that the money could be way better spent on bolstering the conventional armed services that have been cut to the bone after 7 years of Tory austerity and wasting cash on botched procurement.
How a new Trident system would protect us from the threats of the 21st Century is beyond me. A tiny fraction of the Trident budget could fund the best anti-terrorism and anti-cyberwarfare task forces in the world, but no. The majority of Labour politicians (and voters for that matter) prefer genocidal dick-waving to sensible investment in things that would actually keep us safe, and Labour is a democratic party, so they've pledged to waste spectacular amounts of money on renewing Trident.
Basic Income
The Labour welfare policies are very good indeed. They've pledged to scrap the sanctions and Work Capacity regimes that cost the taxpayer far more to administer than they save in reduced benefits, and pledged to ban corporate outsourcing. The only thing I would have liked to see is a concrete proposal to begin looking into the benefits of Universal Basic Income as various other states have been doing.
Monetary reform
I would have liked to see more from Labour on monetary reform, but I guess the idea of fundamentally changing the way money is created and distributed within the economy is far too radical for most Labour MPs to support, or for most ordinary people to even properly understand.
Only 10% of MPs actually understand how money is actually created, and public understanding of the fact that the private banks just magic up new money out of nothing at the moment they issue loans is so little understood that people often think you're talking crackpot conspiracy nonsense when you try to explain how the monetary system actually works.
Constitutional issues
I strongly disagree with the Labour stance on Scottish independence. I think it's both wrong to ignore the democratic mandate for another referendum, and strategically inept to simply parrot the Tory anti-Scottish line. If they had any sense at all Labour would be campaigning for a "moderate" middle-ground option instead of picking one side of the debate. The SNP and the Greens want full independence. The Tories' and the extreme-right want Scottish subservience to Westminster rule. There is plenty of space between the two polar extremes for a middle option of devo-max. This option would hand more powers to Scotland to control their own destiny, and it would also allow Labour to clearly differentiate themselves from the right-wingers who are trying to ignore the democratic mandate for another Scottish independence referendum and expect the Scottish to just do as they're told. Instead of further damaging their reputation in Scotland by siding with the Tories, the extreme-right and the sectarian bigots, Labour should be loudly and persistently demanding a third "moderate" option on the ballot paper.
Although Labours plans to democratise the House of Lords and empower local democracy are much better than sticking to the status quo, I would have liked to see them go further by pledging to replace the outdated and woefully unrepresentative Westminster voting system with a more modern proportional system.
I would also have liked to see Labour address England's constitutional deficit. If Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London all get their own proportionally elected parliaments, why should the English regions be left unrepresented?
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Having noted these minor and major disagreements, I still think it's still by far the best Labour Manifesto I've ever seen. It's an incredible achievement that the party got over the divisions of last summer and put together a really good manifesto like this.
Of course absolutely everything in it isn't going to be to my, or to your, or to anyone's tastes, but so much of it is good and extremely popular stuff that a few blips don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
The fully-costed
The Labour Party manifesto has been fully-costed. Every single spending commitment has an allocated funding source. They claim it's the most comprehensively costed manifesto ever, and I can't remember seeing a better one.
Right-wing political propaganda is incredibly pernicious, so even though the Labour manifesto is fully-costed and the Tories are making false and uncosted spending pledges all over the shop, we're going to hear a lot of right-wing headbangers ranting on about "magic money trees" and the like for the next three weeks.
The answers to these people are simple:
1. Ask them for details on how Philip Hammond is going to find the money to plug the £2 billion black hole in his first budget that was caused by his U-turn on the National Insurance hike for self-employed people. If they can't explain it (which they won't be able to), then ask them why they think it's appropriate for the Tories to rely on harvesting "the magic money tree".
2. Ask them whether they can show you the comprehensive and fully-costed plan for Brexit, or whether the cost of doing that is going to be funded by harvesting "the magic money tree".
3. Ask them if they know where private banks get their money from, and explain to them that the banks simply create it out of nothing and then rent it out to the rest of us in interest bearing loans. Ask them to explain how the private banks creating 97% of the money supply in this manner is less of an example of harvesting "the magic money tree" than a Labour pledge to fund free NHS hospital parking by increasing tax on private health insurance, or a Labour pledge to provide free school meals for all primary school children by ending the tax break on private school tuition fees.
What we can do
The right-wing media have desperately tried to smear the Labour manifesto as a load of nonsense in order to discourage people from reading it and thinking about it for themselves. They know that there is a lot of common sense stuff in there to appeal to ordinary people and they really, desperately don't want people making up their own minds instead of just mindlessly doing what they're told.
Read it for yourself - As I said in the intro to this review, don't just take my word for it. Don't just take anyone else's word for it. Read through it for yourself and think about it for yourself. Don't let other people tell you what to think about it.
Share it - Make sure other people see it. Print it off and give a copy to your grandparents, your parents, your friends, if you think it would help.
Talk about it - Don't just give people a copy or send them a link. Ask them to actually read it and then engage them in discussion about it. Ask them which policies they like and which they don't like. If you're talking to your grandparents ask them whether they like the guarantee to keep the triple lock on their pension and their pledge to properly fund social care and the NHS, and ask them which bits of the Labour manifesto they think would be beneficial to you and your generation too.
Register to vote - If you're not registered to vote you won't be able to vote in favour of (or against) the Labour Manifesto. Check that you are registered to vote here. If you're a student check where your vote would be most effectively used here.
Encourage others to register - If every Labour Party member encouraged just two people to register to vote in the next week, that would increase the number of voters by a million!
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If it wasn't already clear how genocidally insane Theresa May was being when she bragged about her willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball last year, it's even clearer now.
It turns out that the Tory government knew that a Trident missile had flown off in the wrong direction just weeks before the vote, but they hastily covered it up in order to make sure the parliamentary debate to write a blank cheque for Trident renewal was won.
Seeing as it's now clear that the Tories knew that our nuclear missile delivery system is prone to flying off towards the people it's supposed to be defending, it seems that Theresa May was actually expressing her willingness to incinerate 100,000 British men, women and children in a catastrophic nuclear missile malfunction, just as long as the (mainly American) arms companies that run our "independent" nuclear deterrent get to gorge on the £205 billion+ it's going to cost us.
Even if you think it's a bit of a stretch to say that the extraordinary cover up of the malfunctioning missile indicates that Theresa May is willing to incinerate British people with nuclear weapons, it's still absolutely undeniable that she's willing to see an awful lot of British people die in order to cover the obscene cost of renewing our stockpile of Doomsday Machines.
People are dying in hospital corridors because of Tory cuts to the NHS, and yet they're still ruthlessly slashing NHS services while demand keeps going up. The Tory policy of deliberately under-funding the NHS and social care is undeniably costing lives.
Just a fraction of the obscene amounts Theresa May wants to squander on Trident would save thousands of lives if it was spent on the NHS and social care. But the lives of ordinary plebs just don't matter to Theresa May and her ilk. Whether it's the innocent foreign plebs she openly admitted that she would incinerate in a nuclear weapons crime against humanity, or the British plebs dying in hospital corridors to pay for her Weapons of Mass Destruction vanity project, she just doesn't give a damn. They're just the "lower orders" after all, meaning their lives are just as disposable as the cannon fodder who were marched to their deaths during the First World War.
As long as Theresa May gets to secure a vast windfall of public cash for her arms company mates then it doesn't matter how many plebs have to suffer and die to cover the cost of it.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Before clearing off for their extended summer holiday Theresa May's Tory government announced that they're planning to hammer another nail into the NHS coffin by scrapping NHS bursaries for university students by 2017.
The plan to scrap bursaries and replace them with loans would result in trainee nurses and midwives leaving university with over £50,000 worth of debt. The starting salary for a newly trained NHS nurse is just £21,692 per year. The idea that people are going to jump at the opportunity to load themselves up with over fifty grand in debt for a job where only a tiny minority ever progress far enough up the pay scale to earn more than £30,000 per year is ridiculous. A Unison survey of working nurses found that over 90% said that they wouldn't have trained as a nurse if they had had no access to the NHS bursary.
The Royal College of Nursing has described the plan as unfair and risky, while the Royal College of Midwifery has said that the move threatens the future of maternity services in the UK.
Other health specialisations that will be hit hard by this Tory plan to lumber trainee health professionals with mountains of debt occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, podiatry and radiography.
The scrapping of NHS bursaries is yet another piece of evidence that Tories are conducting a deliberate ideological war of attrition on the NHS and its staff.
Since 2010 the Tories have shut down dozens of A&E units and maternity wards and made it far easier to force the closure of even more NHS facilities against public opinion (despite promising to end forced closures prior to the 2010 General Election); NHS mental health funding is in crisis; several Tory NHS privatisation scams have ended in chaos (like Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Cornwall out of hours GP services and the Brighton ambulance fiasco); waiting times have skyrocketed since 2010 so the Tories simply scrapped the waiting time targets; Jeremy Hunt has provoked a bitter ongoing dispute with junior doctors; In April 2016 Theresa May introduced an absurd "earn £35,000 a year or you're deported"; rule for non-EU workers; Brexit means that skilled health workers from within the EU are likely to be deterred from coming to the UK (especially given Theresa May's refusal to rule out the forced deportations of EU citizens); and now the Tories are trying to provoke a recruitment crisis by scrapping financial support for student medical professionals.
The idea that these things are all coincidental or unplanned is staggeringly naive. Paul Charlson, the boss of Conservative Health has already explained that the only way to conceivably scrap the socialist NHS "free at the point of use" principle is to create "a feeling in the country that the health service is falling apart".
The Tory blogger Henry Hill went even further, laying out the full Tory blueprint for wrecking our public services.
The Tory government claim that scrapping the student bursary system and lumbering health professionals with huge debts will save the country £800 million a year, which they say will be invested in creating more places for student nurses and midwives. This is hardly rational. How does it make sense to increase the number of health care training places whilst simultaneously trashing demand for those places by removing one of the main incentives for people to study for careers in health care?
To put the cited £800 million a year "saving" into perspective, the estimated cost of renewing Trident and the associated running costs over the 30 year lifespan is £205 billion. That would be enough to pay bursaries to student nurses and midwives for the next 256 years!
Theresa May's decision to write the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history to the corporations that stand to make £billions from renewing the UK's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction one week and then hammering yet another nail into the NHS coffin by scrapping NHS bursaries the next is a perfect illustration of her warped priorities.
Theresa May (and all Tories) are dedicated servants of capital. To them it makes perfect sense to shovel £billions in taxpayers' cash at the corporations that operate the UK's privatised nuclear weapons systems (Jacobs Engineering, Lockheed Martin and Serco).
Theresa May (and Tories in general) have a burning ideological hatred of the NHS because it is an efficient and highly popular example of state socialism. The Tories hate it because they're ideologically opposed to any forms of socialism (apart from socialism for the rich of course) but they have to dishonestly claim to love the NHS because it's so incredibly popular.
The true Tory objective is to wreck the NHS as much as they can so they can eventually justify scrapping the socialist "free at the point of need" principle entirely and introducing a US style private insurance system. The scrapping of NHS bursaries is yet another step towards this rarely admitted but all-too-obvious Tory objective of ruining our NHS.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In claiming that austerity means "living within our means" Theresa May has made it absolutely clear that she's intent on promoting the exact same simplistic, reality-denying, economically illiterate drivel as David Cameron did before her.
The Tories know that the vast majority of the 93% of people who attend state schools end up receiving absolutely no training in the economic basics, so they know that we're susceptible to accepting misleading economic platitudes like "there's no money left", "Labour bankrupted Britain" or "living within our means".
When they say stuff like that, they either actually believe it, or much more likely, they know it's abject counter-factual rubbish that only the economically uneducated could fall for, but they claim to believe it anyway because they hold the electorate in such contempt that they think they can spew toxic economically illiterate drivel all over the place, and we'll all just lap it up like it's manna from heaven, then repeat it to our friends as if it's our own well-founded economic opinion.
Theresa May's performance at her first Prime Ministers' Questions made it absolutely clear that nothing has really changed. Theresa May has replaced David Cameron, but she's still relying on the exact same scriptwriters to feed her misleading economic platitudes, snidey put-downs and ways of avoiding answering direct questions.
Just days after writing the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history to the corporations that stand to make £billions from Trident renewal Theresa May had the absolute gall to try to claim that Tory austerity is about "living within our means".
Apparently we're so broke as a nation that since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010 the Tories have laid off 36,000 police, 7,000 firemen, 30,000 military personnel, tens of thousands of NHS staff, and they've shut down hundreds of libraries, Sure Start centres, public toilets and dozens of firestations and NHS facilities like A&E and maternity wards. But despite apparently being so broke we can't afford to properly fund our military or public services, we can afford to squander hundreds of billions on renewing our stockpile of pointless doomsday machines!
It's spectacularly easy to contrast Theresa May's ridiculous "living within our means" platitude with her decision to write the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history just days before, but it's also easy to demonstrate that if "living within our means" is the objective of Tory austerity, then it's abjectly failed.
If austerity is about "living within our means", then how is it possible to explain the facts that the national debt has risen by well over half a trillion pounds since George Osborne introduced his austerity agenda? How is it possible that George Osborne spectacularly failed to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015 as he promised? How is it possible that the Tories are now admitting that they have no hope of eliminating the budget deficit by 2020? How is it possible to explain how George Osborne created more new debt than every Labour government in history combined? How is it possible that household debt levels have soared back above pre-crisis levels?
If this last six years of massively increasing debt was a Tory effort to "live within our means" then I'd hate to see what a Tory spending spree might look like!
The reason austerity has failed so spectacularly in terms of "living within our means" is that "let's cut our way to growth" is an economically illiterate proposition. It doesn't take a great deal of brainpower to realise that the best way to reduce debt is through evidence based economic policy where more money is channelled into investments and services that produce more economic activity than they cost, while cuts are only considered to areas of government spending with poor returns on investment.
The failure of austerity isn't really a failure at all though, because the point of it was never really to reduce debt levels at all, it was always to use a load of debt fearmongering and misleading economic platitudes to justify a massive upwards redistribution of wealth.
If austerity is judged in terms of "living within our means", then surely even the most rabid Tory tribalist would have to admit that Osborne failing to eliminate the budget deficit in five years was bad enough, but causing a lost decade of investment and failing to eliminate the deficit by 2020 is going to be a spectacularly abject failure.
If austerity is judged in terms of creating a massive upwards transfer of wealth on the other hand, then it's undeniably been a roaring success, with the super-rich taking ever larger slices of the national pie while the young, the disabled, children and the working poor have had the burden of Tory austerity loaded onto their shoulders.
The sad thing is that there are still millions of economically uneducated people out there who buy into misleading Tory economic platitudes like "living within our means" and still, even after six gruelling years, fail to realise that austerity is a con, and the platitudes are just a smokescreen to distract the economically naive from the real agenda.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
It's beyond obvious why Tories called a vote on Trident renewal instead of concentrating on the really important and urgent task of figuring out what the Tory plan for Brexit actually is.
The Tories know that Trident renewal is one of the biggest divisions in the Labour Party so they decided to score party political points by calling a debate on a Labour Party sore issue instead of concentrating on the fundamentally important task of actually dealing with Brexit, which is one of their own sore issues and also the reason the economy and political system are in such chaos and the thing that should undoubtedly be the over-riding priority of the government.
Political point scoring
The fact that this vote was just a display of party political points scoring was absolutely obvious because the legislation being debated consisted of just 14 lines of text and included absolutely no budget whatever. Essentially the Tories asked parliament to write a blank cheque for the corporate contractors who stand to make £billions from renewing the UK's privatised stockpile of unusable doomsday machines*.
The Westminster establishment club duly voted, by a whopping majority to squander untold £billions on nuclear weapons, which could be used as yet more ammunition against Jeremy Corbyn who (alongside the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party) opposed the immoral and economically unjustifiable plan to write the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history in order to build a new set of British weapons of mass destruction.
Deflecting attention away from the biggest split in the Tory party (Europe) and the chaos and economic uncertainty it has caused by driving a wedge into the biggest split in the Labour Party is a cynical move, and it's been successful in provoking even more Labour divisions. However this display of opportunistic political point-scoring at a time when the government should have been concentrating on fixing their own Brexit mess did throw up a couple of significant problems for Theresa May and the Tories too.
Scotland
The first major problem is that 58 of the 59 MPs representing Scottish constituencies voted against the renewal of Trident. The idea that it is in any way morally justifiable to keep the UK's nuclear submarine base at Faslane, just 25 miles from Scotland's most populous city, is absurdly anti-democratic when the overwhelming majority of Scottish MPs oppose Trident. If English people want to hoard a stockpile of mass indiscriminate slaughter machines, then surely they should keep them in their own country, not in a country that wants nothing to do with them.
Holding a vote on Trident renewal immediately after Scotland voted so heavily in favour of Remain looks like a policy of deliberately antagonising the Scottish electorate and increasing the already significant momentum behind the campaign for a second Scottish independence referendum.
Mass indiscriminate slaughter
When asked by the Scottish National MP George Kerevan whether she would authorise a nuclear strike that would kill 100,000 innocent men women and children, Theresa May didn't even hesitate to say that she would mass execute huge numbers of non-combatants.
Only days after she came to power in a cloud of hopelessly misleading rhetoric about how much she cares about the poor, the vulnerable and the working class, she's admitted that she'd incinerate tens of thousands of innocent people.
Maybe people who knew nothing about Theresa May's toxic track record at the Home Office, her appalling use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, her family destroying immigration policies, her disgusting parliamentary voting record and her opposition to human rights ... might have lapped up all the mainstream media rhetoric about her being a sane and sensible "safe pair of hands", but her willingness to incinerate vast numbers of innocent men, women and children, for whatever reason, is an absolutely chilling demonstration that she's a dangerous fanatic.
Her willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians also demonstrates what a searing hypocrite she is. In 2003 she voted in favour of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What hypocrisy it is to support the catastrophically under-prepared invasion and occupation of a country because their leader might have weapons of mass destruction, when you then go on to admit that you'd slaughter thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
When it comes to willingness to commit horrific acts of mass slaughter, why is it considered acceptable for Theresa May to say that she would willingly incinerate tens of thousands of innocent people in a nuclear furnace, yet if she said that she was willing to kill the same people by means of a carefully orchestrated kill-on-sight genocide policy, chemical or biological weapons or in extermination camps there would be a huge outcry about it.
What is it about the most environmentally devastating form of mass genocide possible that makes it a "sensible" thing for a politician to admit a willingness to do, when other equally deadly forms of mass genocide are rightly considered to be morally indefensible?
ConclusionsThe Tory decision to hold a vote on Trident instead of concentrating on the much more urgent task of resolving their own Brexit mess was a staggeringly cynical piece of political opportunism. It did manage to achieve its main objective of triggering even more Labour Party infighting, but it also came at a price. The Trident vote not only drove a wedge into the Labour Party, but it also hammered another huge wedge into the rift between pro-EU, anti-Trident Scotland and anti-EU pro-Trident England.
Another significant issue is that Theresa May massively undermined all of her soft-Tory rhetoric by admitting that she'd willingly commit a savage act of mass indiscriminate genocide, and also exposed herself as a wanton hypocrite in the process.
Of course a lot of mainstream media rote-learners are going to continue to believe the propaganda line that Theresa May is a sane, level-headed "safe pair of hands" despite the fact that she's prepared to deliberately antagonise Scotland in order to score political points against Labour and openly admits that she'd be willing to commit the most heinous act of instantaneous genocide in British history.
Anyone with the thinking skills to understand the cynicism of her political maneuvering and the magnitude of what she said about the mass killing of non-combatants has to understand that she's a dangerous and utterly ruthless individual who doesn't give a damn about the consequences her actions have on other people's lives (although, as I previously mentioned, you would know that about her already if you knew about her parliamentary voting record and her toxic track record at the Home Office).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
* = Interestingly, despite all of the faux concern over the jobs supported by the nuclear weapons industry, the names of the corporations that stand to make £billions from Trident renewal (Lockheed Martin, Jacobs Engineering, Serco) were not mentioned a single time in the entire parliamentary debate.
£205 billion (a price tag that has doubled since 2015) is an extraordinary amount of money to spend on renewing a bunch of pointless doomsday machines that nobody in their right mind would ever use.
Nuclear weapons are a massively expensive hangover from the Cold War. They are literally useless in the kind of asymmetric warfare the the United Kingdom keeps getting involved in. Nuclear weapons are of no use against the likes of ISIS and Al Qaida, and neither are they of any use against homegrown terrorists. France's stockpile of nukes hasn't stopped them from suffering one terrorist atrocity after another and the same goes for Pakistan.
The idea that the UK would be open to invasion (from Russia? China? Who?) should we stop wasting vast fortunes on maintaining the capacity to commit mass indiscriminate slaughter is utterly absurd. Italy has no nukes, Spain has no nukes, Japan has no nukes, Australia has no nukes, Brazil has no nukes. If countries without the means to commit mass genocide are so ripe for invasion, why have none of them been invaded?
Another thing to consider is the fact that operation and maintenance of the UK's "independent" nuclear deterrent was privatised back in 1994. The consortium that operates our nuclear weapons is 66% owned by US corporations, and 33% owned by the corporate outsourcing giant Serco.
Serco are so incompetent that they couldn't even run the GP out of hours service in Cornwall properly, but somehow they're in charge of maintaining nuclear weapons!
If just half of the £205 billion (and rising) cost of renewing the UK's ability to commit mass indiscriminate slaughter was spent on improving the UK's conventional (useable) military capacity, the UK would be militarily stronger, it would create far more jobs, and there would be plenty of money left over to invest in infrastructure and services to actually benefit British people.
That's not going to happen though, because there are too many vested financial interests in digging a pointless new Trident money pit to shovel £billions into, and because there are an awful lot of people in Britain, and especially in the Westminster establishment club, who see international relations as some kind of dick waving competition where those with the biggest stockpiles of pointless Cold War relics have the most important voices.
So the conventional military is going to continue to be shrunk with one cut after another as it has been since the Tories came to power in 2010, British soldiers are going to continue to be sent into combat with inadequate equipment, and the country as a whole is going to continue suffering a debilitating lack of investment in infrastructure and services, all so that Theresa May and her successors can maintain the ability to trigger nuclear Armageddon.
They don't care about whether such weapons of mass destruction are necessary. Even if they do honestly believe that they are necessary, they don't give a hoot whether Trident renewal represents the best value for money, or whether a less expensive, more versatile weapons system could be developed.
The UK military-political-media establishment want the money to be wasted in this way, so it's going to happen no matter how little sense it makes, and anyone who dares object (for moral reasons, or on cost/feasibility grounds) will be routinely derided and condemned as raving extremists.
How the parties stand
Tories: The Tory party strongly favour renewing Trident, and are determined to press ahead with the Trident renewal vote in order to score political points against Labour, despite the fact that a lot of funding and technical issues remain completely unclear. Theresa May even tried fearmongering about the threat of Russia in order to justify the Tory stance that Trident renewal is the only option!
Labour: The Labour party is deeply divided on Trident. Jeremy Corbyn and a significant share of the party membership oppose Trident renewal as morally indefensible and/or a vast waste of money, but the majority of Labour MPs support the Tories writing a blank cheque for the private companies that stand to profit from Trident renewal.
UKIP: The 2015 UKIP manifesto pledged to scrap Trident renewal and invest in a cheaper more flexible form of nuclear deterrent, but like most of their manifesto the policy is lacking in specific detail.
SNP: The SNP are united in their opposition to Trident, and especially the location of the Trident nuclear base at Faslane, just 25 miles from Glasgow (Scotland's most populous city with 600,000+ inhabitants).
Liberal Democrats: The Lib-Dems want a "value for money" review to consider Trident renewal alongside alternatives to a like-for-like replacement.
Green Party: The Greens strongly oppose nuclear weapons and propose nuclear disarmament.
Plaid Cymru: The Welsh national party strongly oppose Trident renewal too.
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