A peer of mine who read my previous nuclear rant said that it was the most way out theory he had ever heard on the subject. (I said it was to protect against domestic forces seizing power.) He didn't agree that my theory was the one that best fitted the facts, although he couldn't express which fact in particular it did not fit. All he could say was he couldn't believe that the British state would be evil enough to deliberately target its own people with nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
Now, I don't believe that the British state is that nationalist. If it feels comfortable with the idea of threatening nuclear annihilation to ten million Russian/Chinese people, say, I can't see there's going to be a problem with threatening the entire working class of Lancashire. The state is equally remote from both classes of folk. It certainly spends more time consulting with the ruling classes of China/Russia than it does with the working class of England, who are no more than a nuisance to it. We also know that the British state is quite comfortable with operating a highly dangerous nuclear facility at Sellafield which will continue to pose a threat to this island for thousands of years. That plant is not safe. Over a medium timescale, a bad accident is as inevitable as the next San Francisco earthquake.
I moved the subject on to the justifications of Trident, undoubtedly an escalation of our nation's nuclear capability which was brought into service after the cold war. What's funny is if you talked to the same apologists 13 years ago, they would have said, Of course, it's to protect against the Russians. Now it is necessary to come up with another excuse. You assume that Trident is necessary and wise, and you come up with reasons for its existence. This is, needless to say, the wrong way round. You should not have to be listing the problems for which Trident is the solution. You should be stating the problem, and then listing the solutions, among which Trident is but one, and then argue that it is the best.
The self-contradictory list of justifications, as I recall, went like this.
1. It's not carrying nuclear weapons at the moment. [In spite of a recent upgrade in warhead capability for more multiple warheads.]
2. It will be phased out in 5 years time anyway as it becomes obsolete. [Why was it phased in throughout the 90's when it was tactically obsolete already?]
3. If the UK had unilaterally disarmed, it would lose its place on the UN security council. [That's not part of the rules. Anyway, if it was, what would be the problem? I suppose we could give our place to Israel. They might vote with the US for war and against peace a couple more times than the UK does. This latest state of war did not even pass through the UN, so it is irrelevant. What would be wrong with giving our place to India, the next most populous unrepresented nation, say? Maybe they would have a bit more backbone to stand up to grave threats to world security in the way that the UK does not.]
4. It's kept the peace and has been a deterrent for more than forty years. [There is an overwhelming lack of evidence for this claim. "Peace" has been kept in spite of nuclear weapons rather than because of them. In fact, no one can deny that had there been half as many nuclear bombs built than there were, it would have fulfilled an equally "credible deterrent", and been much safer from the problems of misfiring, proliferation, and waste. This proves that at least half the stockpile has nothing to do with "deterrence". You can push this argument much further.]
5. It's government inertia. It's hard to close down a production process on this scale once it gets going. [For ten years? And not for want of trying. Clearly these people need all the help they can get to close down this dangerous locomotive which threatens all of our lives. Why don't they ask for our help? It is the duty of all of us to get out and help halt the production of death machines.]
6. I am not an expert. [You are running out of excuses, but irrationally believe that there is a good excuse out there which you don't know and only a real expert cleverer than the both of us can understand.]
7. You seem hostile to America's intentions. I believe they are just paranoid and want to feel safe. Who can deny them that right? [America is acting as a rogue terrorist state by any definition put forward to date. I am hostile to America because of what it is doing--today--not what it is.]
8. Of course they have a right to build a missile "shield". They are terrified of the small number of nukes held by these few rogue states at their borders. [Everyone knows that the justification of the NMD is a lie. It is an offensive weapon. Not a single engineer believes it could work as a method of defense, so it can't be used for that. Also, it's funny how America can be threatened by an undetectable number of nukes, but when it is doing the threatening it requires millions of them.]
9. Americans don't always get their own way. They got their butts kicked in Vietnam. [Casualties among the Vietnamese people who had nowhere else to go and had never threatened war against America even as they supposedly "won", outnumbered the deaths of American soldiers by 800 to 1. Maybe the Americans didn't quite win, but they certainly didn't lose anything like as spectacularly.]
And he has the gall to tell me that my theory on the justification of Trident is way out and unreal.
I have a strong conviction that skilled engineers who work on the design and manufacture of weapons systems in this day and age bear a heavy responsibility for what happens to their use. There is more than enough clear evidence that almost none of it is used for defensive purposes, regardless of the name given to the Department. The equipment is either destined to prosecute wars far away from home against people who pose no immediate threat to the nation, or are sold for cash to evil dictators. Without engineers building the bombs, programming the missiles, splicing the genes into the smallpox virus, this stuff wouldn't exist.
I cannot accept that the weapons engineers are doing their job out of a sense of duty, like they did in WWII. They must be doing it for pleasure, interest and money in spite of the fact that there is a high demand for engineers in the non-military sectors to do jobs with all of the above properties. Once they begin on their military career path, they are just too lazy to look elsewhere. They delude themselves into feeling that their choice to build what is nothing other than massacre machinery is an "apolitical" choice. Clearly it is not. If they were an Iraqi citizen hired by that government to build an atom bomb, they would probably agree that they shouldn't do it. This proves that the choice of whether to work on such a project is a political decision, in the way that being employed as a doctor is generally not. They must have made a decision--against all the evidence--that they Western military monster will behave responsibly with what they make for it. They have also decided that it does not already have more than enough.
By this logic, the current policy for disarming a country like Iraq is inexplicable. We do not neutralize the relatively small class of trained individuals who have the expertise to successfully build such things as nuclear weapons by ensuring that they are gainfully employed elsewhere, building telephone systems, etc. No. We try to negotiate with the instinctively deceitful political class. Today, the engineers in Iraq have good reason to work for the military: With swingeing UN sanctions, there is no alternative employment if you are skilled and educated in science. If you build military equipment you are likely to have an easier life with less chance of getting murdered. In England, there is no excuse but laziness and delusion. Alternative and more honourable employment is available. But still this shit keeps getting built by people who are free and should know better.
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Since a nuclear catastrophe is fundamentally inevitable, it would do us a favour to start working out the rhetoric right now before it happens and before those in control of the media formulate and broadcast their lies first. In particular, the total responsibility of any nuclear disaster (and we may be speaking of millions of deaths--just because it's hard to imagine doesn't mean it won't happen) must automatically be laid at the door of the government before they can pull their usual stunt of scapegoating some low-level employee or blaming terrorists. The fact is, without nuclear facilities, there would be no nuclear accidents. Those who forced them to be built against the public interest, and who insisted that they be administrated largely unscrutinized and in secret because that made things easier, must not escape the blame for one instant. Of course, they will say, they cannot be held responsible for every design and technical detail of what each person in their employ did when making a mistake, that's not humanly possible. Of course. They cannot do that without help. But at every stage of the game they threw up barriers in the way of people who could have helped. When serious mistakes and errors are made, it was they who made sure that they were not only possible, but very likely.
But that's not a problem, they think. The rich elite who have for so long ruled the world are readily willing to sanction massive ecological degradation in the name of the economy, state security, whatever, because they feel that they, and their children, and their children's children, will forever be rich be able to buy their way out of the mess. If the world has been contaminated by plutonium, in all the food, in all the water, they believe that they will be able to purchase non-radioactive food for their personal consumption if they are willing to pay the money. The rich prefer everything to work as a free and fair market, because that way they can always get what they need, even if there isn't enough for everyone else.
Unfortunately, after people have witnessed a few deaths by cancer of people they know, they will no longer follow the logic of the market structure. People who grow uncontaminated food will be unlikely to sell it for money, but instead give it to people they care about. People who cannot afford uncontaminated food will be under no moral obligation not to steal it (the fear of contracting leukaemia will certainly over-ride the discipline of the market contract). And best of all, entrepreneurs will be out there taking contaminated food and rebranding it as uncontaminated to sell on to the rich people as a form of hypocritical justice: if they pretend their reactors are safe, we can pretend that the food we give them is safe. Hopefully, also, doctors who are any good at curing cancer will be able to tell them to wait in line like the rest of us. If they don't like it, maybe they should have made the money available to train enough doctors when they could have, instead of hoarding it for themselves.
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There was a student CND gathering in Liverpool that I missed because I went to a cave surveying weekend in Yorkshire. But they needed a driver to take people up to the biannual Faslane blockade up in Scotland. Keen to contribute something, I volunteered to drive the minibus.
On Sunday I rode round like nutter on my bike trying to assemble all the bits of paper I didn't know I needed to hire the bus. Believe it or not, the new improved driver's license comes in two mutually useless pieces, rather than one which can get things done. The first piece is a credit card sized photocard that fits in your wallet. But there is no point in carrying that. You need the other bit of paper that you carefully buried in the bottom of the wardrobe when you got it because it didn't look important.
I took the 17 seat minibus back to the uni and the list of people going in it was down to 7. By the time we left at 6pm, we were down to 5--a single car load--including me. Oh well. Acres of wasted space and a thirsty diesel engine on the road in the rain.
They say we live in a democracy, but this has got to be a sick joke. We get to "choose" our leader, indirectly, from a choice of two who share virtually the same policies: a caricature of choice as much as choosing which supermarket to buy your food in, Tesco's or Sainsbury's. These two supermarkets fight it out tooth and nail to corrupt the planning authorities. They make a choice of what we will get. We cannot choose neither.
Choice. It's a laugh. As I drove across the border into Scotland I saw signs about how the roads had been privatized. The one we drove onto was operated by Amey Ltd., who probably hired the same bulldozers and builders as everyone else, but now with a new layer of management. There had been a competitive tender, and choice, but it was not for us. The Prime Minister and his appointees were the audience of this private competition, and they made the choice. Amey has to keep them happy, not any of us. Consent is obtained from above rather than below.
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Our exercise of democracy is seriously limited, for all its noise. It's practically non-existent. There is this election thing which is called once every 5 years when they are feeling good and ready (not when we feel it should be done). They organize a big party. The corporate media mobilizes on every level and tells us that radical stuff favoured by the rich and not the poor is good, but the other kind of radicalness is irresponsible and would harm their economy. We make an 'X' on a paper knowing that due to the system most of our votes are going to be completely ignored. And then everything stays exactly the same.
In between times, much shit happens, and many policies are rolled out and put into action. We have no right to complain about them, they say, because we are in a democracy and could have voted about it in the last election. Of course, this isn't true. We know this. The election is always run as a kind of referendum on one or two carefully chosen emotive and immediate issues on the day. It has nothing to do with the vast body of unquestioned policy that comes alive between elections. On that, we have no say, since, in a very literal sense, democracy is totally suspended. If the public has any grievance with policy, it has absolutely no right of access to the inner circles of power until the next election, they tell us. Only then can we hope to change anything when it is already too late, fait accompli.
This is a cynical exploitation human frailty: the instinctive habit of hope in spite of the evidence. People play the National Lottery every week for decade after decade in spite of never winning back anything, and being aware of the fact that they will almost certainly never will. But they keep hoping, again and again, like idiots.
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This same optimistic gambling instinct has been harnessed to rule us. Every four to five years the public gets the chance to spin the wheel which decides who's boss. This time, it's the rich people-- again! Hard luck. But it was fair dice, so you can't complain. Even if they painted the whole wheel themselves with a few thin slivers of justice, which you wouldn't want to land on anyway because that would ruin the economy and we would take away your jobs. Come back in five years (or when we decide we're ready) and you can spin it again. Who knows, you might get lucky next time. I want you to hold onto that notion in the meantime, while you lump what we're doing.
The great thing about being in a democracy (if we were in one) is that the public could bring up any issue it wanted to the attention of the executive, at any time, and demand that it not be dismissed. There is no mechanism for this. You could have a mechanism which says that two million signatures from eligible voters will force a binding referendum to be held on the next referendum day (May 1). We could mobilize this. We could choose to ban GM foods, decommission nuclear weapons, or reverse the disastrous privatization of old age pensions, for example.
Nobody bothers to collect two million signatures because it means absolutely bugger all. If we were a democracy it would mean something, but it doesn't because we aren't. Democracy only exists one day out of every thousand. We're to obediently wait till that day when much of the damage will be done, and the corporate media finds it so easy to distract our attention at the crucial moment, time and time again.
It is entirely rational not to be interested in politics if there is nothing you can do about it. So most people aren't, because they are rational. I am crazy to be wasting my time if I bother to learn about it. I am not following proper advice. The politicians go to great lengths to explain that it is right and proper that policy should not be unduly influenced by "uninformed" public opinion. The facts of overwhelming hostility to privatization, current transport policy, the international arms trade, or involvement in foreign wars make no change to the package of policy we have been endlessly lumbered with as a result of the spin of the election wheel, is considered a "good thing". It is a sign of "responsible government" capable of standing up to the "short term" will of the people.
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It is the design that we have no right of veto on any of their policies, no matter how much we hate them.
The political claims of superior wisdom entirely contradict the theory of democracy. Not only that, they are lying. They tell us that the public takes a short term view while the politicians take the long one. This is categorically false. Tipping nuclear waste into the sea is a good example of a short term solution favoured by governments. It has never been popular with the public, and for good reason. The public know they will be eating it in no time. Even dumping waste in the ocean on the other side of the world is not popular with the public. Now why is that, if the public favours short term, selfish solutions? In practice, the public do occasionally vote for a short term fix over a more lasting solution, but it almost always happens unintentionally after a long campaign of lies and disinformation. Often we are duped into favouring a fix for a problem that isn't even there.
The wholesale privatization of our pensions is a good example of this. We were told that the state with all its powers of compulsory taxation and control across the entire legal economy could no longer afford to keep its citizens fed and sheltered in their old age. We were informed that we now had no choice but to deal with a private pension provider (from among their number we could freely choose one at random on the basis of its look and no kind of experience, and accept our fate like slaughtered sheep). The private pension system is supposed to raise all its money from the profits of corporations listed on the stock market. These may be huge, but they are undeniably smaller than the economy as a whole, of which they form but a part. For example, the incomes of all teachers, nurses and doctors are not part of corporate economy (yet. Until their professions, too, are privatized and there is a tax subsidised corporate layer slotted in between them and ourselves, their employers, which is listed on the stock exchange, into which pension companies can "invest" their assets and extract out the profits in some sort of gross parody of the income taxation.) So, observing that it raises its money from on a subset of the economy, the private pension system cannot possibly raise more money than the government. It's just not possible. If the government can't afford something, then the corporations can't either. And I don't buy the idea that since the corporations are transnational, the investment market for the pension system is larger than the national taxable economy, because everyone is doing it. It may be large, but it is divided up. Taking more than your share is stealing from all the other nations on this earth, and you can't count on getting away with that.
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But of course the government can afford to care for people when they get old. Its options are the same as when it starts a war. It can raise taxes, run deficits, operate conscription and national service. If the work has to get done, and people want it to get done, there is no reason not to set up a fair system of personal obligations. Two years of service per person should be spent taking care of old people on a basic wage. New immigrants have to do four years from the day they take up citizenship. It's better than army service because you don't risk getting killed.
Why are we expected to want to sacrifice our lives for war that has happened usually as a result of error and ambition on part of our leaders, and not do anything as a society for the class of old people into whom we all will inevitably graduate? Instead of banking money into the hands of the rich who will be tempted to walk off with it, we should be banking our labour in the form of care for the elderly. As a form of justice, those who die young are exempt from this obligation. They don't need it. Yet the current system is thought reasonable: people who die young because they have been sent to war against their will will experience no benefit from their sacrifice whatsoever.
I object to being told to park money into questionable stock market saving schemes where it will be ripped off and used by irresponsible executives to wield power when there are people hungry on the street and children not being taught in proper schools today. What is the point in storing up money like this? Why is a school not a better national investment than some corporate asset stripping pot of money? Why have we let the system be deconstructed so that the former kind of investment is no longer credited in a way that can be withdrawn later in life, but only the latter kind is?
The other part of the elite's case against democracy, aside from the lie that real democracy would illicit greater short termism than we presently have, is that we would wreck their intricate plans. Each government policy is part of a coherent and consistent package, they say. You can let the public have the authority to veto any small part of it which they don't like because that would interrupt the carefully designed system which they are putting in place.
Exactly. That's the whole bloody idea.
People are not stupid. If people objected to a system of policies over which they have no control at the moment, they are most likely to mobilize behind a single policy that will blow the biggest hole they possibly can through it.
If we could, we would vote for the UK to be a nuclear free zone. This would take out nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear secrets and the importation of nuclear waste. That's the point of forcing a referendum on such a policy. None of these activities are publically popular. The idea that a government can claim it is both democratic and refuses to listen to the will of the people on this matter is a complete contradiction.
The UK military nuclear complex is not subject the Euratom code of safety. They could set fire to a block of plutonium and rocket fuel on a train in central London and not be breaking any law. There is not a single citizen of this great "democracy" of ours who thinks this is a reasonable state of affairs, apart from one or two appeal court judges, and the top brass of the military whose job it is to lay down our lives for the benefit of the state which all too often operates against the public interest.
For democracy not to exist, there must be no effective avenues of public expression to dissent against policies of their choice. All attempts at public protest must be ineffective and be seen to be ineffective. You don't want people to get the wrong idea, that they could change anything, because they might start to put more effort into it. You can't have that. You wouldn't know what would happen. They might demand further democracy.
I slept in the minibus till 9am while the rest of the people caught the coach out from Glasgow to Faslane at 5 in the morning. I needed my sleep if I was going to do all the driving in the afternoon. I headed out with an empty bus and got caught in the rush hour traffic. What crap. I arrived at 11am when things were winding down and there was not much blockading happening.
The security around the base is still ludicrous. Lots of cars were going in and out because the blockade was now broken. People even arrived to work there on bicycles. There are cameras all over the place, but they haven't really invested in more in a while. My local train station probably has more CCTVs looking at the public than that base does now.
At midday there was an exciting moment when one protestor stopped and dived under an articulated lorry coming out of the base. It took ten minutes for the police to fish him out. Two of them got their yellow jackets dirty with oil and mud.
Ten minutes later, the protest organizers sorted out an official closing ceremony (all stand around in a circle and dance) and we went home. I ensured that I had a completely full bus for the ride back to Glasgow, so it wasn't completely wasted. Not much money has got paid back to me in Liverpool still, particularly after I ranted that I do not accept cheques for fiddly amounts because I never get round to cashing them.
I arrived home just in time to play half a game of underwater hockey in the evening. I invited one of the CND students into the pool to play, but he had never snorkelled before. He floated around a little bit with a mask on and eyes as wide as saucepans. I have never seen anyone so tense in the water. He was like a cat standing on a block of ice that was about to sink.