Brown is deluded on Trident
Gordon Brown is desperately scrabbling around trying to find places to make cuts while the economy plunges deeper and deeper into debt (over £800bn of public debt at last count). He’s sensibly identified Trident as a possible place to make cuts, but he’s far too nervous to go the whole hog and scrap it, so he’s proposing a small scaling back and reduction in capacity (welcome though that is).
What’s annoying though is not so much Brown’s innate timidity (from a man who ironically wrote book on courage), but the fact that he’s trying to sell this as an example of ‘statesmanship’ in the move toward unilateral disarmament. Do me a favour! We can all see what this is about; Brown is spinning a defence cut as something he planned all along in the name of multi-lateral disarmament. Just this July Brown stated clearly that he was committed to updating the Trident submarine-based missile system despite its estimated £20bn cost (see: here) and he was adamant that he was committed to Trident in its current configuration in 2007 (see: here). By now though, Brown has probably convinced himself that his new position and his fine words are what he really meant and believed all along.
I used to think that if you could sum up Labour using only one adjective it’d be: autocratic or controlling. Now, I’m beginning to think that self-deluded might be more appropriate.