A guns before butter fixation

The Labour leadership has joined hands with the Tories to attack Clegg for his party's policy of halting the replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons and delivery system, thereby saving up to £100 billion over the next 40 years.

Nothing displays the political ineptitude as well as the wrong priorities of new Labour than this guns-before-butter fixation.

Throughout the first party leaders debate last week, Gordon Brown stuck rigidly to his Peter Mandelson-dictated brief of repeating ad nauseam: "I agree with Nick" or, for variety, "Nick agrees with me."

Mandelson's clear intention was to create suitable mood music to prepare the way to a post-election lash-up between Labour and the Lib Dems to prevent a Tory government taking office.

But the major issues on which Brown failed to "agree with Nick," apart from Clegg's preposterous pretension that the Lib Dems provide a vibrant, youthful alternative to the "old parties," were Trident and the banks.

The Lib Dem leader articulated public anger at the role played by the banks in precipitating the international financial crisis much more forcefully than either Brown or David Cameron, even though any perceived differences in how he would relate to the bankers is largely window dressing.

However, he played his Trident trump card to perfection, throwing it down three times during the course of the debate and chiming with public hostility to this ruinously expensive white elephant.

It speaks volumes for new Labour's tactical cack-handedness that it chose this no-win issue as the basis for seeking to undermine the Lib Dems' surge in opinion polls.

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth vied with his shadow Liam Fox to charge that the Lib Dems had failed the acid test over whether they could be trusted with the defence of Britain.

Ainsworth was reduced to dragging up failed Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell's view that there is "no feasible alternative" to Trident while Fox resorted to blood-curdling warnings about no-one knowing what lies round the corner.

This is precisely the kind of scaremongering that any country could use to justify possession of weapons of mass destruction, along with Ainsworth's red herring about unilateral nuclear disarmament leaving Britain open to nuclear blackmail.

There is no record of any nuclear power resorting to nuclear blackmail of a non-nuclear country. Nor is there any evidence of Britain's possession of WMD giving it additional international authority or respect.

And yet Ainsworth had the gall to announce "a mature and well-informed debate about the future structure of our armed forces" in February only to reveal that Trident replacement was off the agenda.

As long as new Labour allows its political agenda to be dictated by the banks and by military adventures initiated by the US, Labour's electoral fortunes will continue to slide.

Even on the grounds of party-political advantage, Labour should not be nailing its colours to the Trident mast.

Public opinion is firmly opposed to any replacement of Trident, believing correctly that, especially during an economic crisis, this relic of imperial posturing ought to be dumped rather than hundreds of thousands of public-service jobs that face the axe irrespective of which party leads the next government.