Corbyn hit by mass Labour Trident revolt
JEREMY CORBYN was heckled and accused of lying by his own MPs yesterday and told he was “defending the country’s enemies” as he voted against renewing Trident.
The Labour leader was told by his backbenchers that he was holding party members in “contempt” by voting to scrap Trident in defiance of his party’s policy.
MPs overwhelmingly backed renewing the nuclear deterrent by 472 to 117, which means it is secure for a generation.
Mr Corbyn suffered the biggest rebellion of his leadership as 140 MPs supported renewal despite his opposition while just 47 voted against. The SNP boosted its claim to be the “real opposition” in Westminster as all 54 of the party’s MPs voted against keeping Trident, seven more than Labour.
However, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, attacked the SNP during his closing speech by saying the party was “happy to cower under an American nuclear umbrella”.
Theresa May used her first appearance before MPs as Prime Minister to insist that she would
press the nuclear button. Asked if she was “personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children”, she replied: “Yes.”
The vote had been scheduled by David Cameron before he left No 10. The former prime minister made his first appearance on the back benches yesterday, listening to the debate but not intervening to speak.
Labour MPs took three different positions on Trident with backbenchers supporting renewal, the shadow defence and foreign secretaries abstaining and Mr Corbyn voting against.
A succession of Labour MPs criticised Mr Corbyn, a lifelong critic of nuclear weapons, for failing to back the party’s agreed position of supporting renewal.
John Woodcock, the Labour MP for Barrow and Furness, said the leadership’s decision to give a free vote on such an important issue was a “terrible indictment of how far this once great party has fallen”. He said: “What Labour’s current front bench are doing is not principled. It shows contempt for the public, for party members and often, in what they say, for the truth,” he said.
A string of other Labour MPs heckled their leader as he spoke.
Toby Perkins, who last month resigned as Labour’s shadow Armed Forces minister, compared his front bench’s opposition to Tri- dent to the arguments “of a 13-year-old”.
Mr Corbyn gave a defiant speech as he called Trident an “indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction”
He pointed to the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the atrocities of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the genocide in Rwanda to show how nuclear weapons were failing to deter violence abroad. “I do not believe the threat of mass murder is an adequate way of dealing with international relations,” he added.
Mrs May also took a swipe at the Labour leader, saying: “Some people suggest to us that we should actually be removing our nuclear deterrent. This has been a vital part of our national security and defence for nearly halfa-century now and it would be quite wrong for us to go down that particular path.”
At another moment she said that “some members of the Labour Party seem to be the first to defend the country’s enemies and the last to actually accept the capabilities that we need”.
Of Scotland’s 59 MPs, 58 voted against Trident renewal, fuelling the demand for another independence referendum from the Scottish Nationalists.
Angus Robertson, the party’s Westminster leader, said the vote exacerbatesd the “democratic deficit” north of the border. He claimed that the day when the people of Scotland determine their political future was now “fast approaching”.