LABOUR LAST week launched a disaster not only for the fight against nuclear weapons but for the Labour Party.
Of all policy gains made by the left in the Labour Party in the last ten years unilateral nuclear disarmament was by far the most important. elimination British nuclear weapons, the removal of all nuclear bases 2586 583 would be a major contribution that Labour could make to peace and to the fight for freedom and socialism internationally.
While it is exaggerated to say, as the United States and others claim that a abandoned nuclear weapons would break up the Atlantic Alliance there is no doubt that it would be the greatest crisis NATO had ever faced. And if NATO were weakened everyone in the world fighting for freedom, from Nicaragua to South Africa, sleep easier in their beds.
The weakening of western Europe would also be the best aid that anyone could give to those fighting for freedom The Burope - for it is the threat from the west which gives even the slightest threadbare ustica hon repression in Eastern The Power to Defend Our Country is a disaster from the title onwards.
First it is not 'our' country at all. Just ask yourself which particular bit you own — as opposed to the ICIs, or GECs, or British Petroleums?
Second the policy has nothing to do with "defence. exist to 'defend' anyone. It is the most powerful military alliance, based on the most powerful economies, on earth. hile, or the black populatio would be able to South Africa fighting British and American backed apar theid regime, are not being 'defended' in by the powers that make up NATO They Bastern perialism throughout the world.
If there is a 'Soviet threat', as the for Soviet document claims, then bluntly it is Europe. But ridiculous to attempt to with conventional ones.
there is no Soviet threat at all -which there isn't.
no Soviet threat. At the Reykjavic summit Gorbachev proposed the total The people of Nicaragua, of against the are being threatened by them. Soviet Union. NATO is an alliance to back im- The Third the document is incoherent.
'defend' ourselves against its nuclear weapons The only way unilateralism makes sense is if Fourthly it is easy to prove there is isn't even clever. elimination of nuclear weapons and the idea the Soviet Union is going to fight a conventional war to subjugate Europe is just as ridiculous The governments which turned tha down were those of the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany, Britain's NATO allies, not that of the defence document ecomes ridiculous. It proudly an nounces in its preface: NATO wa formed forty years ago when Britain had a Labour government. And it was a Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose energy and drive were instrumental in creating the system of collective security based on NATO. If Labour is going into an election attempting to portray itself as the party best equipped to defend us from the Soviet hordes it is going to get smasned. The policy is not merely wrong, it Kinnock could have launched Labour's unilateral nuclear disarmament campaign with a timely that the proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons was the way forward. He could have attacked the hypocrisy of Thatcher Reagan's multilateralism for the fraud it was. He could have announced the elimination of British nuclear weapons as the first step to their elimination throughout the world. In other words, the Labour leadership could have launched a perfectly credible campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain - and it would have been the truth.
Instead, Labour chose a cold war The leadership chose demonstrate to the ruling class that the imperialist NATO alliance is safe in Labour Party hands. That policy is not simply a lie. It will be an electoral disaster as well.
Socialist Action 19 Dec 1986
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defence decument The Power to Defend Our Country which is a