General Gives Corbyn Marching Orders
Have you noticed that the looney left have absolutely no sense of humour. Perhaps this results from the stress and strain of fighting the class war from comfy armchairs in affluent areas of north London, in the muck left by their foreign cleaner and dodging the bullets of exploding bottle corks. Also, they get pretty steamed up if their daft ideas are exposed as…..well…. daft.
Only this can explain the reaction of Mr Jeremy Corbyn leader of part of the Labour party to statements from the Chief of the Defence staff.
It is the policy of the Labour party (or was the last time we looked) to support the replacement of the Trident submarine nuclear deterrent system.
A difficulty is that Mr. Corbyn has pacifist leanings. Were he, (heaven forfend), Prime Minister and the Russians threatened invasion, he’d presumably send them a pretty stiff letter and get his cabinet to pass a strong resolution deploring aggression.
What Mr Corbyn has made clear is that he would not press any nuclear button.
Now, the concept of nuclear deterrence is that possession of a nuclear weapon and ultimately a willingness to use it prevents conflict. It is not a deterrent if one has a weapon but promises never to use it.
A bank robber with a sawn off shot gun who constantly assures cashiers that its safety catch is on and that he will not shoot while always being careful not to point the gun in their direction, might as well equip himself with a banana to coerce the bank staff.
A weapon lacks the power to deter if there is a promise never to deploy that weapon, was, essentially, the point made by the Chief of the Defence Staff in reply to questions during a television interview. The point the general made was a logically obvious one and should have surprised no-one. Possession of nuclear weapons ceases to deter aggressors when they are assured that those weapons will never be used against them.
In response, the revolutionary Mr.Corbyn suddenly became a champion of staid convention asserting that the military should not meddle in politics. To describe the making of a statement which was a self- evident truism and which might have been reached applying the intellect of the average 7 year old child, as meddling in politics is somewhat stretching that term.
Perhaps Mr. Corbyn’s very real anger arose not as a result of any constitutional issues but because his unsuitability for the responsibilities of high office as well as his alienation from many in the Labour party were shown in this issue.