Jim Murphy is too respectable to oppose Trident. For some, that makes him hard to love
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Version 0 of 1. If the voting has gone according to media expectations, Jim Murphy will be announced today as the new leader of the Scottish Labour party. The MP for East Renfrewshire fought a gutsy and well-noticed referendum campaign and will be Nicola Sturgeon’s ablest opponent when (and if) he wins a seat in the Scottish parliament. He has promised a dramatic difference in the party’s behaviour: “We will be optimistic, we will be patriotic, we will stop fighting with ourselves and we will come up with radical policies.” But the ball-and-chain of his old beliefs may soon start dragging at his feet. Alone of the three candidates for the job – Neil Findlay and Sarah Boyack are the others – Murphy has an unwavering commitment to British nuclear weapons: not only to Trident, with its running costs of around £2bn a year, but also to replacing Trident with another submarine missile system, at a one-off cost of around £30bn, plus £2bn annually thereafter (the latter equal to 6% of the defence budget, or the salaries of more than 90,000 nurses). “We’re not a unilateralist party, and we’re not going to become a unilateralist party,” Murphy said in a radio interview earlier this year, and in describing the Michael Foot years as “a flirtation with surrealism” he echoed the bluff military patriotism that since the second world war has never been far from Labour’s heart. A few quotes, more vivid than anything on the same subject that a general has produced, tell the story. First there was Ernest Bevin in 1946, telling the cabinet that Britain had to have the atomic bomb whatever it cost, with “the bloody union jack flying on top of it”. Then came Nye Bevan at the Labour conference in 1957, attacking a unilateralist resolution as “an emotional spasm” that threatened to send British statesmen “naked into the conference chamber”. And when two similar resolutions were passed at Labour’s Scarborough conference in 1960, Hugh Gaitskell promised to “fight, fight and fight again” to overturn them – “to save the party we love”. Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent was then still airborne, but Trident’s precursors were on their way. The first submarines of the US’s Polaris fleet arrived at their new base in the Holy Loch a few months later, and came and went in relays until the cold war was over, overlapping for a time with the Royal Navy’s missile submarines that had begun to sail from their headquarters at Faslane, a few miles across the Clyde in the Gare Loch. In the new fashion for the personal political narrative, people often like to talk of the moment when they were radicalised. For Jim Murphy, that time came during his youth in apartheid South Africa, to where his parents has migrated in the early 1980s. For Nicola Sturgeon (and many others), the credit goes to Mrs Thatcher, deindustrialisation and the poll tax. But an earlier generation of Scots – mine – had their politics changed or inflamed when those US submarines and their refit ship anchored in the Holy Loch, which until then had been a pretty inlet in the Argyll hills, fringed with the summer homes of prosperous Victorians and visited by nothing more threatening than pleasure steamers and yachts. Of course, the anti-Polaris protest and the Aldermaston marches fed from the same anxiety about nuclear conflagration, but it would be wrong to see the first as simply an extension of the second. It was more anti-American in flavour, understandably enough, and the despoliation of one of Scotland’s best-loved landscapes, just a quick train and ferry ride from Glasgow, generated part of its anger. Or at least I felt that way, as one of thousands of young demonstrators in the marches and sit-downs of 1961. There was another difference: the kind of people who came. If the typical Aldermaston marcher could be characterised as a middle-class student in a duffle coat, his equivalent at the Holy Loch was a Clydesider of the skilled working class, either an apprentice or an older man (occasionally a woman) who belonged to a craft union and knew his anarchists from his syndicalists. Folk music was important; the Holy Loch protests generated many songs. In retrospect, the most noticeable absentees were Scottish university students – their idea of insurrection was limited then to throwing flour bombs at rectorial elections – and ambitious members of the Labour party. Look down the roll of Labour grandees – John Smith, Donald Dewar, Derry Irvine – and throw in a Liberal, Menzies Campbell, for good measure. All attended Glasgow University in the early 1960s, and I think I’m right to say that not one of them went anywhere near the Holy Loch or a guitar. They were blazered, clever and decent, and they frightened few horses; only by comparison with those who came after them did Smith and Dewar justify their later reputation as models of compassionate radicalism. Jim Murphy is part of this respectable lineage. It would be unfair to blame it for Scottish Labour’s steep decline, because for decades many Labour voters were just as respectable and conservative as their leaders. How many people went to the Holy Loch, after all? Five thousand? Ten thousand? For that matter, how many can be found camped today near the gates of Faslane? Perhaps no more than a couple of dozen. Although the SNP can cite polls that show Trident is hugely unpopular in Scotland, other polls suggest that its removal comes low on the list of priorities; in at least one poll, where people were invited to name their concerns, it didn’t feature at all. Nonetheless, the arguments for Trident’s retention and replacement look increasingly unpersuasive. Perhaps the best of them is that it employs several thousand workers in a part of Scotland where jobs are hard to find, and that orders for new submarines would prolong Barrow’s future as a high-tech shipbuilding yard. Otherwise, it becomes hard to disagree with Alex Salmond’s verdict that Trident is both unusable and unaffordable. The final decision on replacement will take place in 2016, allowing the present craft to be taken out of service in 2028. Cost alone should surely kill it. In the meantime, it would help Scottish Labour enormously if the shadow cabinet (or the UK party executive or wherever such decisions are made) could help Murphy eat his words by abandoning its commitment to a folly created by Bevin and Attlee. In the prescient words of a memo written in 1949 by Sir Henry Tizard, the distinguished military scientist, the trouble with Britain having the atom bomb was that it made the country blind to reality. “We persist in regarding ourselves as a great power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power, and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” |