Ah well I suppose it helps keep unemployment down

WHEN the Spendalot District Council decides to fritter away several hundred pounds of ratepayers money on some new office furniture for the Council Chairman you can guarantee a public outcry. Letters appear in the local newspaper from "angry ratepayer" or "disillusioned toter" admonishing the council for its lack of thrift.
People get angry about relatively small sums of money being wasted but remain remarkably quiet when the local authority embarks on some multi-million pound motorway project. They don't even bat an eyelid when the Government says it is about to spend billions of pounds on some great national project.
It is of course much easier to argue in real terms — to relate to the several hundred pounds spent on office furniture — than it is to argue in the abstract. The same is true for politicians.
In the early hours of the morning of August 4 — at 6.32 — the House of Commons debated the Government's decision to spend £5 billion on the new Trident missiles. These are the replacement to Polaris missiles — Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. , There were five Conservative MPs present for the debate; one Ulster Unionist; four Labour MPs and the five Liberals who had initiated the debate. It is understandable that at 6.32 am the House of Commons was not packed for this debate on Trident — although two days later on August 7 there were nearly 200 MPs present for the debate on the Eastbourne Harbour Bill — and that debate did not finish until just after 6 am.
Clearly no MP can be present for every vote or for every debate — and holding debates at such an hour has a lot to do with low attendance — but to manage only 15 MPs for the only debate Parliament has had about Trident while 200 can turn up for the Eastbourne Harbour Bill says a lot for Parliamentary priorities.
The arguments against the prOliferation of nuclear weapons are fairly obvious ones. Very few of us — apart from the extreme militarists — want to see civilisation wiped out. The presence of vast arsenals of nuclear weapons simply increases the likelihood of total annihilation.
The late Lord Louis Mountbatten — speaking after half a century in military service — put it very well when he said that the old Roman precept "If you desire peace, prepare for War" no longer applied in the nuclear age: "The nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the Illusions they have generated."
Trident, in particular, has little purpose in the defence of the West. It Is an independent deterrent; Britain's own nuclear virility symbol. Its cost is in addition to our annual expenditure on NATO which is supposed to be the West's joint response to any would-be aggressor.
It has a strike value of only two per cent and it is extremely unlikely that Britain in her wildest and most foolish moments would be stupid enough to launch an independent nuclear attack.
It is also doubtful whether Trident will be capable of doing the military job of which it is said to be capable. By the 1990s Britain's enemies may be able to track our submarines from the moment they leave port. Their inability to remain hidden would then leave them as vulnerable to counter attack by the enemy as the landbased missiles. Trident would then be LS billion worth of junk.
The "opportunity cost" of Trident is in fact its greatest drawback. It will not only cost us opportunities in conventional defence but will prevent us from embarking on much needed domestic expenditure as well as fulfilling commitments to overseas spending or in implementing the recommendations of the Brandt report. Trident is £5 billion worth of wasted opportunities.
In the event the public might have expected a full Government debate on the merits of this project. There has been a conspiracy of silence by the two Front Benches about Trident because Labour cannot agree among themselves. The last Labour Government was officially pledged to the maintenance of the independent nuclear deterrent and embarked on a £1,000 million refit of Polaris without Parliamentary approval and without so much as a written answer In the House of Commons.
They are therefore in some difficulty in criticising the present Government for Its lack of consultation or failure to take Parliament into its confidence. The Secretary of State fur Defence, Mr Francis Pym, is now doing his best to give the impression of public accountability — he has even issued a booklet facetiously called An Nere: e in Open Government This is humbug. As The Times leader put it on July 16: "The Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons suffered the humiliation of holding hearings after the decision had in fact been made."
Secrecy in decision-making even extends to the way we deal with out NATO allies. The Observer described the way the Trident deal was arrived at on July 20 "The British Government was so concerned to keep the details of the deal secret that it felt unable to trust anyone at the British Embassy here (in Washington) to type its letter of agreement. Instead, the negotiators took some Embassy notepaper to the Pentagon and the letters of exchange were typed there. Then, after lunch at the House of the British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, the letters were signed in the street on the boot of a car. The date was Friday June 13 this year."
Not only was that an unlucky Friday for those who put a premium on peace but it was a sad day for Parliament because it demonstrates how impotent our democratic processes have become, how decisions are taken, and how little public outcry there has been about such a crucial issue.