Trident lives to die another day?
The real crowd-pleaser for those Lib Dems who got up in time for the Trident debate this morning was Defence Minister Nick Harvey’s suggestion that Trident lives to die another day.
The gist of Mr Harvey’s words to the Conference was that because the government is pretty certain to delay the Trident decision on construction contracts, “the main gate” contracts as they are known in the jargon, until after the expected May 2015 election, there will be an opportunity for the next parliament to take a view on whether to go ahead with those contracts.
Now, billions would already have been spent on design work, but there would be billions more still potentially to be saved and as a new spending review and a new defence review (they are now meant to be five yearly) would be taking place, it could be that a different Labour policy binds their MPs and they could combine with the Lib Dem MPs in the next parliament to vote down a like-for-like Trident sub fleet replacement.
A lot of “ifs” in all that but one of them might get answered around 4.30pm on Saturday when we find out who the new Labour leader is.
Just for clarification, the government seemed pretty dead set on pushing the construction contracts the other side of May 2015 for some time.
It’s only a smallish movement as other technical reasons had moved the plausible main gate decision date back to end of 2014 or early 2015 anyway.
What then seems to have happened is that the Treasury spotting this elasticity in contract start dates started taking a look at whether there were other stretches or delays that could happen and savings that could be screwed out of them (there aren’t any significant savings out of delaying the main gate decision by just a few months to fall the other side of the general election).
That’s where the issue of “continuous at sea deterrence” came up as the MOD said you would be increasing the risk that the current subs are all under maintenance at some points and you’re not able to deploy any of them, gaps in the 365 day deployment.
Not sure if that particular row is utterly over as the search for savings in the Trident programme may not be a closed file quite yet.