Wednesday 20 January 2016

No point in Trident Replacement with no steel industry

It appears that the Conservative Government is making the catastrophic decision to allow Great Britain to lose its steel industry. At the same time they berate Jeremy Corbyn for his view that Trident replacement is a waste of money. Their position could not be more illogical. The premise of an independent deterrent is that the UK may need to take independent action against another nuclear power. Think about this proposition for a moment. The UK would be isolated against world opinion and need our own nuclear missiles to prevent national destruction. In such a terrible struggle, surely we'd need guns, ships and planes. In such circumstances, we couldn't buy cheap Chinese steel could we? If there is ever a situation where the UK needs a mass rearmament, this is only possible with a thriving steel industry. If Cameron believes that such a scenario is inconceivable, then so is a situation where we need Trident. 

There are few scenarios where Trident could actually make a contribution to the UK defence. If we lose our steel production capacity, we are reliant on goodwill of dictatorships such as China, who will hike prices as soon as their internal market recovers. Steel is fundamental to a thriving economy. A sensible government would nationalise steel production and protect it for the future. My personal view is that they should also nationalise railways and use British Steel to electrify and modernise them. By the time that is done, steel prices would have recovered and we'd have a viable national asset.

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