When Mr Starmer goes to Washington, he is welcomed because of the nuclear weapons he has the power to wield. It is time he noticed who gave them to him, says Fleet Street Fox
There is nothing more important to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom this week than his nuclear weapons. And there is nothing less important to him than the men who provided them.
As Keir Starmer leads a last-ditch bid by European nations to win US support back for Ukraine, he is relying on the fact he has at least one Vanguard-class submarine armed with 64 nuclear-armed missiles patrolling the seas. It is that guardian, alone, which keeps Vladimir Putin at arm’s length on the other side of Europe. It is that power which means Donald Trump might actually listen to him. It is the ability to operate that shield behind which millions of us shelter, whether we like it or not, which puts him in the front row.
When Mr Starmer goes to Washington, he is welcomed because of his nukes and the Continuously-At-Sea-Deterrent. It’s why previous Prime Ministers authorised £12billion to build the boats, and half a billion a time to refurbish them, and another £31bn (plus extras) to provide the next lot. That’s without the £4bn for warheads, £20bn to upgrade the Atomic Weapons Establishment to make them, and the billions more to refit, run, and decommission them.
Unless you live in Faslane, Aldermaston or Devonport, you’re unlikely ever to see what your money is being spent on. And if you do ever find yourself suddenly face-to-face with a nuclear-armed, 16,000-tonne submarine that has surfaced from the depths, the chances are you won’t have long to say “oh, so that’s where the money went”.
It is the fact these weapons are so stealthy that contributes to their political power. And it is also why the survivors of the testing programme which created them are little more than a footnote in history – a group of men who were closest to those early blasts, who show precisely the pattern of cancers and birth defects you’d expect to see in an irradiated population, and who have for decades been brushed under the same rug as all the other secrets that contribute to national security.
Around 40,000 men from Britain and the Commonwealth followed previous Prime Ministers’ orders to pile into planes, board warships, build workshops, collect data, ferry scientists, patrol exclusion zones, line up to watch the blasts, and spend any down time in the same places where nuclear material was stored, devices being prepared, and radioactive detritus had fallen. They had orders to stay there for periods of a few months to more than a year, and in the absence of any courts martial to the contrary it seems none disobeyed.
The descendants of the weapons Britain detonated have been miniaturised and refined, and now sit atop Trident missiles hired from the Americans. The US cannot order us what to do with them, and it is this one tiny bit of independence which means we are not totally in Donald Trump’s back pocket.
Four years ago, as Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer met nuclear veteran families: survivor John Morris, who had lost a child and decades of worry to the effects of radiation, and Alan Owen and Steve Purse, whose fathers inadvertently cursed their own families with seeds sown in the Cold War. He shook their hands, told them that as a father he understood, and vowed: “The country owes you a debt of honour. Your campaign is our campaign.” He earned their approval, but today he is dangerously close to losing it.
His arrival in Downing Street came 18 months after the Mirror uncovered the first evidence of a medical monitoring programme on those troops – human experiments – and 10 months after the launch of a legal action suing the Ministry of Defence to provide the missing data or compensation. On the second day of his new Parliament, Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey said he had a “moral duty” to repay that debt. At his very first Prime Minister’s Questions, South Shields MP Emma Lewell-Buck urged him to set up a year-long special tribunal to uncover the truth about missing medical records.
It was not until last September that a minister from Starmer’s government met campaigners. And it was only in November, the day after a BBC documentary on the issue, that the Ministry of Defence was ordered to begin an internal inquiry into the historic records. Four months on, there are still no answers, and the debt seems no nearer being paid.
Veterans Minister Al Carns has ordered an unknown number of his limited staff to conduct a thorough review, of records and databases he has not divulged, without a deadline or much funding. And in that same period, the Mirror has established that ministers and Parliament were misled by the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which holds much of the historic archive about the tests, and has a multi-billion pound nuclear programme to protect.
So what hope, then, that this minister, with this budget, up against that adversary, will even with the best will in the world get to a truth that has been hidden by the state, from the state, for decades? I’ll tell you: none. The issue is too big and the threats too great for those who guard secrets on our behalf letting us have a truth they’d rather we didn’t know.
Yet if this Prime Minister can provide funds to properly staff a nimble inquiry, and the personal authorisation which is all that would make the AWE take heed, it does not need to undermine anything. The truth can be filleted out of the body politic cleanly, surgically, and the proper reparations made. Otherwise, there is a risk our allies quibble over pacts, a court case which will suck £5bn out of our defence budget gets out of hand, and that everyone forgets Keir Starmer is supposed to be the good guy.
With a few hundred grand and one public statement, the PM can wield his incredible power wisely and say that he acts in the nation’s interests. But that requires a course correction from his current destination – a bitter fight with veterans over a truth that is already out, with a cost not just to the nation but to his reputation, at home and on the world stage. Leadership is not just about setting the tone for nations – it is also about noticing the little things, and getting them right before they blow up in your face. Tick tock, Mr Starmer. Tick tock.
