New Labour and Nuclear Weapons

Abstract

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were first elected to the UK parliament in 1983 as members of a Labour Party whose manifesto called for Polaris to be included in disarmament negotiations to bring about a non-nuclear defence policy for the UK within the lifetime of the 1983 parliament. They were both re-elected in 1987 supporting a manifesto which called for the decommissioning of Polaris and the cancellation of Trident. In 1982, standing for Labour in the Beaconsfield by-election, Tony Blair’s campaigners issued leaflets stating that Labour was ‘the only political party pledged to end the nuclear madness’ and in 1984, Gordon Brown speaking in a Commons debate called the Trident programme ‘unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound’ (Webster 2006). Of course, as Peter Mandelson argues in his own recent memoirs, Labour’s unilateralist stance was one of the core targets for the founders of New Labour as they sought to make the party electable once more. Nuclear disarmament had been ‘part of the glue that held Old Labour together’ (Mandelson 2010: 75); although, Mandelson recalls that his own family never actually marched from Aldermaston to London, instead taking a picnic to watch others do so. Those who sought to reform Labour saw support for unilateral disarmament, which Mandelson described as ‘one of our most entrenched and electorally perverse policies’ (Mandelson 2010: 117), as a substantial barrier to Labour’s return to office.