87 Labour MPs then rebelled again, voting directly against a motion to update Trident.
Green MEP Dr Caroline Lucas, a co-founder and Co-President of the European Parliament’s cross-party peace group, said:
“The Government’s support for Trident is yet another example of its failure to grasp the urgency of climate change. Imagine if its anticipated £76bn costs were invested in energy conservation and renewable energy generation – we might actually have a chance of cutting CO2 levels sufficiently to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. Instead, we are left with an obscenely expensive white elephant that is likely to the world a more dangerous place – at best it is utterly irrelevant to the real security threats we face, chief among them climate change, and a missed opportunity to spend the cash on tackling them.”
Alice Miles, in the Times, also wrote a very good column today, entitled "Has no one got the guts to ditch Trident?"
The greatest nuclear threat we face is anyway not from a national leader but from stateless terror. Osama bin Laden has already tried to buy a nuclear bomb and I don’t suppose he has given up. Wouldn’t we be better off investing in the security of chaotic nuclear facilities around the world than buying more bomb power in Britain?
I would never, ever, ever want a British leader to fire a nuclear weapon. Ever. In any circumstances. Even if someone fired one at us. Even if a country fired more than one at us. I do not believe that responding with equal terror and carnage against other citizens, other families, would ever be the right thing to do.
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