Oliver Kamm

More stuff

Stephen Pollard has some tart and interesting things to say about the Labour politicians who now protest they had nothing to do with the shadowy would-be benefactor David Abrahams. I should not have come across this article had Stephen not mentioned it on his blog, as it's published in The Daily Mail, which is the newspaper above all others whose opinions I disagree with on - to take the proverbial taxi driver's Mastermind specialist subject - absolutely bloody everything. The site might have changed by the time you read Stephen's article, but as I write this Stephen is wedged between an online poll entitled "Is it acceptable for female politicians to show this much cleavage in the Commons?" and an article entitled "My instant boob job from 36A to 36DD - and the effect it had on men (and women)". Just thought you'd like to know.

On a subject you're less likely to read about in The Daily Mail, see the comments here by Deborah Haynes, Baghdad correspondent of The Times, about asylum for Iraqi interpreters who have been assisting British forces. One of the interpreters, currently in hiding in Basra, comments: "The British Government has to put its decision into action and speed up the procedure of moving us from Iraq to the UK as soon as possible. Any delay means that more interpreters will die."

If you're a UK reader, I therefore urge and entreat you to follow this link to a post by Dan Hardie. Dan is a longstanding correspondent of mine who saw the importance, at a very early stage, of pressing the Government to grant asylum to Iraqi interpreters. The issue has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War. It's solely about the humanitarian imperative of aiding people who are in fear of their lives, and to whom our Government has moral obligations. Dan's post will tell you what action you can take. Please do read it; it's important.

I wrote earlier this week about the Oxford Union invitation to the demagogue Nick Griffin and the faker David Irving. I can't mention my reader David Irving without producing a stream of unsolicited crank mail. The last time I commented on Irving, I heard at length from a couple of nutters called, respectively, Jonathan Burgess and Marisa Lorah. Burgess distinguished himself by threatening me with libel action for calling him a racist, and Ms Lorah demanded to know if I was Jewish. To my languid uninterest, I've heard from them again this week. Burgess refers me to an article in The Guardian by Max Hastings, which argues that Irving's "findings are not always perverted". Burgess demands to know if I regard Hastings as a racist too. My answer is, of course, no.

I find Hastings's judgement of Irving perverse. I have in front of me Irving's book Nuremberg: The Last Battle, 1996, which ends with the "moving words" of the Nazi war criminal Alfred Jodl. It's a foul piece of historical falsification that is devoid of any redeeming characteristic, and is therefore typical of Irving's output. (On his website, Irving periodically compares me to a dildo. I'm relieved to hear it, as I'd be worried if he were to commend me for my "moving words".) But Hastings is a weighty military historian whom I don't for a moment suspect of harbouring racist sympathies.

My crank correspondent Jonathan Burgess is, on the other hand, not a weighty military historian and I have every reason to believe him a racist. As he keeps threatening to sue me for libel for pointing this out, I'll refer Burgess in addition to the unfortunate experience of another litigiously minded serial correspondent, the pro-Milosevic blogger and vulgar fraud Neil Clark. I understate on a grand operatic scale when I say that Mr Clark did not succeed, but only elicited a certain amount of wonderment at his activities as a female impersonator. I am not easily swayed from my right to fair comment on matters of public interest, even by anguished imprecations and threats from so distinguished a party.

It's almost a relief to turn to a nutter who hasn't (so far, at least) threatened me with a libel writ. This is Marisa Lorah of California. Ms Lorah merely writes:

CONGRATULATIONS, DAVID IRVING!!!!! YOU WON AGAIN IF BUT JUST FOR ONE NIGHT. FREEDOM OF SPEECH RULES IN BRITAIN AND "SOME" PEOPLE CAN'T STAND IT. OLIVER KAMM IS THE WORST OFFENDER OF THEM ALL. FREE SPEECH FOR WHOM? DAVID IRVING IS THE HERO OF GREAT BRITAIN, WESTERN EUROPE AND ALL OF THE FREE WORLD. DAVID, YOUR FANS ARE MANY AND WE WORSHIP YOU. THE WORLD WOULD BE A TERRIBLE PLACE WITHOUT YOU.

I'm marginally surprised to hear I'm THE WORST OFFENDER OF THEM ALL, as I've argued in print against laws restricting free speech in order to protect against offence. I've specifically opposed using the law - in Germany as much as anywhere else - as an instrument to curb Holocaust denial. But I would not claim to be able to render coherent the contents of Ms Lorah's universe.

Stuff

Apologies again for the lack of activity on this site. Here are a few things I've noted.

A little over a year ago I commented: "I suspect [Gordon Brown] will be a historically insignificant premier, comparable to the Canadian Liberal Paul Martin, another long-serving finance minister who waited years to assume the leadership he coveted."

Obviously this was too generous. Now he's PM, Brown has shown he lacks competence as well as character. His overriding principle for the past 13 years has been merely the knowledge and frustration that the better man became Labour leader and prime minister before him. New Labour under Tony Blair was always, outside the top posts, short on talent. Under Brown, the government is collapsing into a black hole of mediocrity and scandal at exactly the time that a Franco-German axis of liberal internationalism is providing Europe with better leadership and the US with reliable counsel.

Daniel Finkelstein states concisely exactly what I think about the Oxford Union's invitation to the BNP leader Nick Griffin and my reader David Irving. The initial invitation was an absurd and unprincipled piece of theatre. Bigots have a right to free speech (and contrary to the views of the present government, a right to be bigots), but that doesn't mean they have a right to speak at any particular institution. The Tory defence spokesman Julian Lewis - whom I know and respect, and sometimes deputise for in debates on nuclear deterrence - was right to resign his membership of the Union in protest, and to criticise the Oxford Union President in personal terms. Yet the arguments of some other protestors were pernicious. It is not the case that, as an officer of the Oxford University Jewish Society put it, free speech is "overshadowed in this instance". Once the invitation had been issued, it would have been wrong to withdraw it, and protestors who aimed to prevent the meeting ought - on the press accounts I have read - to have been met with a firmer police response. Griffin is a demagogue and Irving is a racist faker; but the offence you and I are caused by their views is entirely irrelevant to civic affairs.

Melanie Phillips believes "Annapolis is America’s Munich — and Israel is the new Czechoslovakia". If Israel is the new Czechoslovakia, it's distinctly odd that for years substantial majorities of the Israeli electorate have favoured the dismantling of most of the settlements in the West Bank as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians (see, e.g., the chart at the bottom of page 28 in this report from the US Institute of Peace). I am not soft on Israel's security. I believe successive Palestinian leaderships bear a substantial responsibility for the failure to achieve a sovereign state alongside Israel, and I fear the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not amenable to any rapid resolution. (Conflicts tend not to have resolutions; rather, they have outcomes.) But it is a prerequisite of constructive Western diplomacy to accept that the conflict is about competing legitimate nationalisms that must both be accommodated in any lasting, pacific settlement. The most senior figures in Israeli politics and diplomacy take this as axiomatic. I know they do, because I've spoken to them, and I know Melanie knows they do, because I've spoken to her.

Finally, there are some new links in the side-bar. I encourage you to visit them; and I shall be adding some more. Ben Goldacre, who writes the "Bad Science" column in The Guardian, is a debunker of all manner of cranks and quacks, especially in the field of medicine. Paul Anderson is a former Tribune editor, the attraction of whose blog I do not mean to belittle by saying it is particularly acute in discussions of the murky affairs of the long-defunct Workers' Revolutionary Party and its late leader Gerry Healy, a corrupt and stupid serial rapist. Marko Attila Hoare is a Balkan historian who, among other things, has gone into some depth on the vexed matter of certain factoids promulgated by the pro-Milosevic blogger and enterprisingly hopeful sometime legal plaintiff Neil Clark. As I indicated in this post, Mr Clark tried unsuccessfully to cover up his inaccurate citation of the output of a "Srebrenica denial" organisation by, among other expedients, lying directly to a Guardian journalist, Dominic Timms - but it's a long and unelevating story, and Marko's account of an exotic cast of characters is quite enough. (I should add that, in his account, Marko in my view is not quite fair to Noam Chomsky. As Professor Chomsky has elsewhere noted my own "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes", it would be wrong of me not to record my dissent at one mild injustice, especially towards him.)

UPDATE: Nick Robinson gives a masterly summary of the Labour donations scandal:

Whatever the final calculations the facts are clear. Labour allowed a "controversial" figure to secretly donate well over half-a-million pounds even after the harrowing experience of the first-ever police investigation to interview a serving prime minister. Gob smacking.

The last sentence expresses my own view in - uncannily - my own idiom.

Huhne in confusion

There is a lot wrong with Chris Huhne's pitch for the Liberal Democrat leadership in The Guardian today, but one paragraph in particular is a shocking muddle:

After the disaster of Iraq, there is surely a premium on independence, yet the government has also agreed to replace Trident with one of equivalent power that will make us dependent on the US for another 50 years. At the non-proliferation treaty talks in 2010, we should either decide that the threats are now so different that we should get rid of our nuclear weapons, or that we should have a minimum deterrent.

Well, indeed; we should have a minimum nuclear deterrent. That's the view of HM Government and Opposition, and I agree with it. What possible relevance to that decision would be an assessment that "the threats are now so different"? Trident is a system for 40 years hence. Defence planning must deal with then as well as now. It is absurd to form a policy on the assumption that the threats we face will not change in that time. We have to anticipate remote contingencies, and we can say with reasonable assurance that if we retain a nuclear deterrent then the contingency of effective blackmail will be not be available to an aggressor. That doesn't deal with all threats; it deals with a particular threat that might arise from a range of other parties.

And if you put as great a premium as Huhne does on an independent policy, then the obvious recourse is to retain an independent nuclear deterrent rather than rely solely on the US arsenal. Huhne makes the magnificent elision, which is a plain insult to the readership, of using the word "dependent" without specifying whether he means dependence in operations or in procurement.

We are certainly dependent in procurement: we're buying a US system at a favourable price. The current Trident fleet came in well ahead of budget because we were buying an American technology and benefiting from a sharp fall in the cost of the missiles. (The procurement cost was originally estimated at £15.6 billion at 1995/6 prices; it came in at £12.1 billion at 1995/6 prices.) But procurement dependence isn't the same as operational dependence, any more than if your car is manufactured by Ford you have to apply to head office when you want to drive it. It's also worth noting (a point made by my debating colleague of this week Sir Michael Quinlan) that when the Wilson Government declined to provide troops in the Vietnam War, there was never a suggestion that the US might fail to honour the Polaris sales agreement unless we relented.

The Bomb is ours; we could use it independently. It is therefore - as is the purpose of a nuclear arsenal - an effective deterrent on our own account, and a reinforcement of deterrence on Nato's part. I'm doubtful that the Lib Dem contenders have thought much about this issue beyond their internal party positioning, and I wouldn't trust them anywhere near this country's security policies.

Trident debate

On Tuesday this week I spoke, alongside the former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the former MOD official Sir Michael Quinlan, in The Spectator/Intelligence Squared debate on Trident. We were arguing for the retention of the British independent nuclear deterrent. The Spectator has a report of the debate here, and the podcast of the debate is here. The format of these debates is that a vote of the audience is taken before and after the speeches. As you will see from the report, there was a huge swing to our side of the argument.

The report is not quite right - and I therefore hold myself responsible for lack of clarity - in citing me as arguing that the independent deterrent "had stopped Russia from contemplating a limited-theatre nuclear attack". It's a small point, but just in case this is ever quoted back at me, I shall correct it here.

There were two occasions - the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962, and the bizarre Soviet misapprehension of Nato's Able Archer exercise in 1983 - on which the world came perilously close to nuclear war. I do not believe, however, that the Soviet Union would have seriously contemplated a "limited" nuclear attack using battlefield or theatre nuclear weapons, owing to the risk of escalation to strategic nuclear war. Our assurance of that caution was the collective security provided by the Atlantic alliance, which - to Britain's immense benefit - existed regardless of our independent deterrent. I do consider, however, that the independent deterrent mitigated the risk of nuclear blackmail by the Soviet Union. Nuclear blackmail would have taken the form of, say, a threat against a British city unless the West agreed to withdraw from West Berlin. A Soviet leader might have calculated, or miscalculated, that a US leader would hold back, for fear of putting American cities at risk, rather than defend Western Europe. It was not a likely scenario but it was a possible one, supposing there had been a combination of an adventurist Soviet leader (say, Khrushchev) and a feeble American one (say, Jimmy Carter). The British (and to a lesser extent, the French) nuclear deterrent made it slightly less likely that such an appalling dilemma might be forced on Western leaders. This is the argument for a second centre of nuclear decision-making within Nato.

In my view, there is a still stronger case for Trident now, in our "second nuclear age". Soviet leaders, while brutal and expansionist, were risk-averse. Even Khrushchev, in the Cuba Missile Crisis, was scared witless by Castro's urging a nuclear first strike should the US invade Cuba. It is not clear whether the same will be true of the likely nuclear acquirers of the next few decades. I take seriously the risk of nuclear blackmail by an emerging power such as Iran, whose nuclear programme I have no doubt is intended for more sinister purposes than the generation of electricity. I believe it would consequently be reckless for us to abandon the only reliable way we have of ensuring that a crisis does not escalate beyond our control, namely our nuclear deterrent.

During the controversies about disarmament policy in the 1980s, the anti-nuclear campaigners almost never, from my experience, dealt with the issue of potential nuclear blackmail if we disarmed unilaterally. But there was one exception worth noting. A CND member called Jeff McMahan, then a Cambridge research student in philosophy, wrote a good book in 1981 called British Nuclear Weapons: For and Against, in which he did discuss the issue at length. Much to his credit, he couldn't get round the fact that the only way to deter nuclear blackmail was a countervailing nuclear threat, and he therefore accepted the logic of Nato's extended deterrence and facilities such as the early warning system at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. In short, he reasoned himself into a position that was indistinguishable in essentials from that of liberal Atlanticists.

Two minor points about the debate. First, the Spectator report states: "Dr Rebecca Johnson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, confessed that she had once ‘danced on nuclear weapons silos at Greenham Common’." Rebecca said this, in fact, because I'd brought it up in the first place as a relevant point of biographical information. It's just a fact. You can read her lyrics for the "Silos Song" here (though to my regret the audio clip isn't working). Secondly, listening back to the debate I realised to my consternation that I had described Trident as our deterrent "to the middle of the next century". This is what happens when you don't use notes. My slip of the tongue puts me in the distinguished company of the hapless Vice-President Dan Quayle, who famously remarked, "I didn't live in this century." It's also an indication of how ancient my arguments are, because I was indeed using them in the last century.

Sweeney does Venezuela

Apologies for the absence of posts this week. I hope to be back to normal next week.

I wrote a short piece a while ago on the thuggish bigmouth President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. My friend John Sweeney, an outstanding investigative journalist who previously exposed what he aptly called the Pilger-Baathist line on sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime, reported for the BBC this week on "how good the controversial President [Chávez] is at running his own country". You can see the programme here.

I stress that I have not yet watched it myself. I am pleasantly unfazed, however, by the news that the Chomskyite Media Lens organisation - founded and headed by an ignoramus, as I demonstrated here - is up in arms about "bias". For some reason, other journalists of usually sceptical temperament don't get the point about Chávez. I did a blog post here about a romanticised version of Chávez's contempt for constitutional politics.

Blair looks back

The Times reports:

Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict.

He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that so damaged him, and was almost certainly one of the factors that contributed to him leaving office sooner than he wanted.

In frank remarks in a BBC documentary, Mr Blair confirmed openly the belief of many of his closest supporters that he never used his position as America’s strongest ally to try to force Mr Bush down the diplomatic rather than the military route.

It was never a “bargaining chip” for him and he was never looking for a way out, he told David Aaronovitch, of The Times, in interviews for The Blair Years. “It was what I believed in, and I still do believe it,” he said.

This rings true and I admire Tony Blair for it. I take the idle blogger's prerogative of quoting from my 2005 book Anti-Totalitarianism:

There is no question but that [Blair] damaged his political standing by committing troops to the Iraq war; had the war not taken place, we can reasonably assume that he would have enjoyed a substantial – and given its unprecedented character in Labour politics – triumphant third election victory. Many, probably almost all, Labour supporters would regard this as an indictment of the PM. I regard it as a measure of the man’s political stature. Knowing that the character of the international order had changed since the Cold War and not just since 9/11, Blair chose to ally himself with a nominally conservative US administration in a war that needed to be fought, when the policy of containment of Saddam Hussein had failed, and the toleration of autocratic states in the region was both an affront to our values and an emerging – though not an imminent – threat to our security.

This remains my view, and what Tony Blair said in The Times today reinforces my opinion of him. I am an immoderate Blairite.

A good man defends his reputation

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week:

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Thursday acquitted an Austrian journalist of "causing the suicide" of a German professor who claimed that the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933. The ruling was handed down in a complicated case involving freedom of speech, libel and anti-Semitism.

The court found in favor of veteran journalist Karl Pfeifer, ruling that Austrian courts failed to protect Pfeifer's good name. The court ordered the Austrian government to pay Pfeifer 5,000 euros in damages and 10,000 euros in court costs.

Mr Pfeifer is a redoubtable anti-racist campaigner and a longstanding correspondent of mine. (You can read his articles in English in the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.) He has kindly kept me in touch with this case. The Court judgement can be read here. The case, in brief, is this.

In 1995, Mr Pfeifer published an article accurately recounting and aptly commenting on the views of a Nazi apologist, one Dr Werner Pfeifenberger. Pfeifenberger sued Mr Pfeifer for defamation and lost. In 2000 the Vienna Public Prosecutor indicted Pfeifenberger under the law forbidding Nazi activities, the National Socialism Prohibition Act. Pfeifenberger committed suicide shortly before his trial was due. A month later, a far-right weekly, Zur Zeit, accused Mr Pfeifer of having driven the "Catholic" Pfeifenberger to his death. Mr Pfeifer sued. A Viennese court ruled in his favour, but Zur Zeit appealed and won its case. Mr Pfeifer then appealed to the European Court against the Austrian courts and government. The complaint was accepted in December 2005 and the judgement was issued on Thursday this week. In the case of Pfeifer v. Austria, Mr Pfeifer won.

I have written quite often about the issue of libel, as English law in the case of Internet publication seems to me a mess and an affront to the principles of free speech. (Oddly enough, I have some personal familiarity with Austrian libel law, and have come to the provisional conclusion that the same is true there.) But I have no doubt that laws on defamation are necessary, and that a citizen of a free society must have a right of redress for damage caused to his reputation. Mr Pfeifer's case clearly comes into that category. He defended himself against an initial worthless action by a bigot. A hate-sheet then made an outrageous accusation against him, and the Austrian court system failed to protect his reputation. I congratulate Mr Pfeifer on his determination to right that injustice and am delighted by his victory.

Okinawa's victims

I wrote recently of the controversy over how Japanese school textbooks treat the Battle of Okinawa in the Pacific War. Citizens of Okinawa have protested at the softening of references to the Imperial Army's involvement in mass suicides. They have my admiration and support, for, as I concluded in my post: "Okinawa demonstrated both the unmitigated brutality of Japan's rulers and the immense costs that the United States bore in order to secure the defeat of an aggressive totalitarianism."

A BBC correspondent has been talking to elderly residents of Okinawa. The story makes fascinating and harrowing reading, and I draw your attention to it. Memory is understandably undimmed:

Hunched over a garden bench, 81-year-old Mitsuoko Oshiro recalls how she was given a grenade by a soldier, who told her that if she failed to use it to kill herself and her family, she would be raped and tortured by the Americans. "I wanted to die, but I couldn't do it. We fled to the hills when the Americans invaded, but they didn't harm us - they just let us go," she says. But 11 members of her extended family obeyed the orders - they all died by taking rat poison.

Another survivor, 76-year-old Takejiro Nakamura, clutches a picture of his sister from before the war. He watched his mother strangle his sister in a cave. "We all wanted to kill ourselves, because we believed the Imperial Army," he says. His sister pleaded with his mother to kill her first, so she was strangled with a rope.

"I blame the Imperial Army. My sister would have had children and grandchildren by now."

Local records suggest several hundred people in Okinawa obeyed the Imperial Army and committed mass suicide.

One pearl of great price

Talk of the devil. I wrote yesterday at a length that will have tested your patience - but there is a lot to say on the subject - of the idiosyncrasies of the hapless pro-Milosevic blogger Neil Clark. Mr Clark is a fanatic and an ignoramus, but (as you will now be aware) more distinctive even than the extent to which he exemplifies those qualities, he's a vulgar fraud.

It is, however, difficult to regard him with disquiet when he writes blog posts on the "Comment is Free" site maintaining, with reference to criticism that he has received from bloggers for his political opinions: "Anyone who deviated from the official party line - as laid down by a self-appointed uber elite of British bloggers - faced a cyberspace lynch mob, more in keeping with Nazi Germany than a country which is supposed to pride itself on its support for free speech." (Note that - as if to demonstrate by suggestion that he, at least, is uncontaminated by Nazi-like influences - the wily Mr Clark invents a word that doesn't exist in German. It should be ueber or über .)

In these circumstances, I ought perhaps to explain to my readers how "Comment is Free" works. I occasionally contribute to the site, but only (excepting one article, which I suggested to the editors) when I've been invited to do so - and I've been glad to contribute to its debates. CiF is not The Guardian, though all comment pieces that appear in The Guardian are published on CiF. Not all CiF articles are commissioned. Some contributors have posting rights; others do not.

I am certain that Mr Clark's account of how he has suffered in the manner of political dissidents in Nazi Germany was not commissioned, and thus will not receive the nominal payment that accompanies commissioned pieces. I'm also certain that the same was true of his article gleefully anticipating (read the piece and see if I have not characterised it correctly) the murder of Iraqi interpreters who have assisted British forces operating under a UN mandate. In short, do not mistake Mr Clark's animadversions for an editorial contribution to, still less an editorial stance by, The Guardian newspaper. Or to put it another way, don't take it out on CiF's editors that this sort of delusional grandiloquence has space and requires moderation. It's just the way it works, and the only real victim of Mr Clark's self-published contributions on CiF is Mr Clark.

I must get on to other subjects now, permanently; and I promise that I will.

Lib Dems on Trident

Daniel Finkelstein comments:

I missed the Liberal Democrat leadership debate on Question Time last night, as, I am sure, did you. But a good friend and acute political observer called me this morning and told me I should make good this omission.

Daniel is of course right: I missed the Liberal Democrat leadership debate on Question Time last night. I haven't made good the omission either. But as Daniel says later in the post that "[Nick Clegg's] position on Trident (almost the only substantive thing he said) is incoherent", I have asked a friend who has watched the broadcast what Clegg said. Apparently it was that, whereas Huhne wished to scrap Trident unilaterally, he (Clegg) wished to negotiate it away.

This is indeed an incoherent position, and it has a disturbing precedent. Negotiating away our independent deterrent is the line that Denis Healey argued (the deterrent then being our Polaris fleet) in the 1983 general election, in order to soften the plainly unilateralist anti-nuclear message held by Michael Foot and advanced in Labour's programme. It makes no sense. Negotiation presupposes that the bargaining chip is retained if the deal is not satisfactory; announcing that you'll get rid of it anyway undermines the point of the negotiation. (In fairness to Healey, who had an impossible task as Labour's Deputy Leader in trying to argue for a disgraceful manifesto that he didn't agree with, he acknowledged as much during that campaign. The response from party activists was predictably and nonsensically furious.)

Scrapping Polaris in negotiations with the Soviet Union was in any event a disreputable policy, because it would have meant the abandonment of our minimum deterrent as against some marginal reduction on the Soviet side. Negotiating away a replacement for Trident prompts the question of whom we negotiate with and for what end. It is inconceivable that any current nuclear-armed state would follow suit. Israel (which as matter of policy does not confirm or deny a nuclear capability) has independent reasons for a policy of deterrence. Pakistan will not abandon nuclear weapons while India does not. India will not while China does not. An aspirant nuclear-armed state, notably Iran or North Korea, will not do so either. North Korea left the NPT regime sooner than abide by the treaty's requirements. Iran has simply lied and dissembled. The proper policy with regard to Trident is not to give it up unilaterally and not to give it up in negotiations, but to keep it. It's already a minimum deterrent.

Had Tony Blair's wish for Liberal Democrat participation in his government come to fruition in 1997, I should have trusted the then Lib Dem leader, Paddy Ashdown, in the post of Defence Secretary (which reportedly is what Blair had in mind). Times change.