Nuclear holocaust: once more for slow learners

I wake today to this headline:

Labour to join Tories in backing a £25bn deal to renew Trident fleet

and the story starts with this:

Labour will fight the next general election on a pledge to retain Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, senior party sources have said. 

So actually, it starts with a direct untruth: Britain doesn't have an 'independent' 'deterrent'. The nukes are largely built, maintained and in some cases rented from the United States. Americans build them. Americans maintain them. Americans provide the satellite targeting information required to fire them. Can we imagine launching one without American permission and technical help? I don't think so.

So not independent. What about 'deterrent'? Well, it's true that the UK hasn't got into any wars at all since it acquired nukes in the 1950s. Unless you count Northern Ireland. And Malaya. Kenya. Suez. Korea of course. A little covert involvement in Vietnam via the Commonwealth. Libya. The Falklands. Iraq (the first time). Iraq (the second time), Afghanistan, Mali, and of course Mr Cameron has now threatened us with 'generational conflict', which sounds like something from Orwell. Bombs have exploded on buses and on tubes.

So yes, it's true that Luxembourg, Andorra and the Vatican have refrained from raining death from above upon the UK, and that may be attributable to the 'nuclear deterrent' if you want to believe that. But the boffins in Tory and Labour think-tanks appear not to have noticed that the UK's enemies are not cackling dictators intent on wiping out their enemies. North Korea has a magnificent line in rhetorical invective, but its citizens eat grass and it survives on China's sufferance. China doesn't need to nuke anybody: it owns the US economy through its investment in American debt. Iran wants nukes because it feels threatened by Israel's nukes. India and Pakistan have nukes because they hate each other and fear China.

The UK faces no enemies who might be usefully dealt with through the judicious application of nuclear weapons. Its enemies tend to be suicide bombers from British streets. Nuclear annihiliation won't deter someone who welcomes death, and even the Tories' hatred of the North won't stretch to dropping 10 megatons on Bradford. The same applies to enemies from abroad. Are we going to nuke Somalia? Or the bits of Mali and Nigeria which harbour opponents? Can we guarantee that only the bad guys are atomised?

Would the UK drop nuclear weapons on non-nuclear enemies? The Americans did it to Japan and the world has been a sadder, more suspicious place ever since. Britain would be a pariah state for ever if it did so. What's the threshold for such an action? It's the act of a psychopath. Governments spend a lot of time condemning acts and groups as 'terrorism'. What is more purely, completely, terrorist than basing your political authority on the ability to kill absolutely everybody both now and in future generations in pursuit of a temporary disagreement?

The UK military knows this. It increasingly doesn't want £25bn spent on useless weaponry in a period of budget cuts, £25bn which would build a lot of ships and buy a lot of boots. There is no possible war using nuclear weapons that doesn't end in the wholesale destruction of entire countries and peoples. If it's true that the UK is in more danger now than ever (mostly, I submit, because it keeps invading places), it needs conventional weaponry: not Doomsday devices.

So that's the military case dismissed. On to the legal case. It is, and has been since international law was codified, illegal to target civilians. Yes, most countries have done so: Dresden, Coventry, most of Vietnam – but the rather thin defence is that they were 'collateral damage': not the intended target but unfortunate bystanders. It's Israel's standard defence for bombing Palestinian schools and hospitals.

You can't do this with nuclear weapons. A nuke atomises every man, woman, child, sparrow, gnat and flower over a huge area. It poisons the earth and air and water for generations. Any use of nuclear weapons is therefore illegal. The political defence of course is that possession of nukes makes the use of nukes less likely, through the deterrent effect – which is both madness and as I've explained above, ridiculous.

The only genuine defence for the possession of nuclear weapons is Labour Cold War hawk Aneurin Bevan's impassioned plea to the Party not to send him 'naked into the conference chamber'. It's instructive that he framed the possession of nuclear weapons in such terms: there is a distinctly sexual, phallic aspect to nuclear power. Bevin firmly believed that Britain had no credibility in world affairs unless it too possessed the power to kill millions of people and poison vast swathes of the planet. He may, sadly, have been right: under the soothing tones of our politicians, the only thing our political classes respect is savage violence.

This is the law of the playground, of the hostage taker, of the spree killer. Respect me, or I'll blow your head off.

I'm ashamed and disappointed that my party still clings to this doctrine. Underneath the bluster, it's cowardice: fear of the big boys pointing and laughing at the little boy who doesn't have a gun. It's time to grow up. Bevin's nukes were a prosthetic to wear in place of an Empire, part of the embarrassing and unseemly British obsession with remaining 'important'. It doesn't have to be like that. The world is full of decent, honest, principled and highly respected countries who don't, in the last resort, depend for their authority on possessing the ability to turn large areas of the globe into toxic cinders. Japan. Germany. Italy. Australia. New Zealand. Denmark. Sweden. Norway. Spain. Brazil. Chile. Canada. South Africa. Ireland. It's time to accept that possession of nuclear weapons is a tacit admission of political, diplomatic and moral failure: not of significance.

Labour has a chance to puncture the self-delusion of the bullies. It can divert that £25bn towards conventional weaponry if it must, or towards diplomacy. It can demonstrate that even for Security Council chair-holders, respect can be acquired without possessing the means to the Apocalypse. It can become a leading realist, showing the others that the nuclear obsession is a military and political dead end.

Sadly, Labour doesn't want any part of this. Not due to any principle, but simply because it is scared of the Daily Mail, which will echo cynical Tory accusations of being 'soft on defence'. It's not true, of course: Labour has shown an unseemly haste to get into any wars going, however illegal. But short-term tactics will always trump principle in this rotten excuse for a polity. I'm not surprised that the Conservative Party is and always will be keen on nukes: their politics are and always have been honestly and openly based on oppression, dominance and violence, because it believes that people are essentially animals. But Labour: Labour always professed to be more humane.

My politics are based on hope and aspiration towards a better future. Time and again, even my own party demonstrates that it prefers the certainty of small-c conservatism, war, cynicism, distrust and fear.

President Strangelove, I presume?

Just back from a swim (good job I have flexible work hours). Despite possessing the hydrodynamic qualities of a brick with an eating disorder, I managed my 40 lengths of backstroke in 27 minutes, so I'm feeling triumphant. And sick.

I see that everybody's jumping up and down about Ahmedinejad's re-election (if such it is). Plenty of people are screaming that Iranians shouldn't vote for a man hellbent on nuclear weapons. Er… isn't that what the UK has done every four years since 1950? That the US electorate has done since 1945? Etc. etc. I happen to be a CND member - and all the NPT-compliant states have signed a treaty committing them to abolishing nuclear weapons. Just as I do absolutely nothing to help, so do the big states. Worse than that, we allow India, Pakistan (mmm, stable relations), Israel and several other states to have them without any commitment to abolishing them.

What steps have we taken to abolish them in our own countries? Well, Obama's actually talking about reductions, but that's about it. The UK is about to spend £20-30 billion we don't actually have, on replacing Trident. Apparently, the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people in a few minutes isn't quite enough. We need more, bigger, missile to deal with… er… those pesky guerillas in Afghanistan. No, that isn't right. There's a definite threat from, well, someone, which can only be dealt with by turning entire cities to molten glass, whole civilisations to rubble, sterilising huge chunks of the earth's surface. It's just that I can't think of one right now.

Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons? They're caught up in an insane race with Israel. The intellectual justification's very simple. It's all about having a huge, barely metaphorical penis. When Labour MPs and others objected to Britain pursuing a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, the British Foreign Secretary, clearly saw the ability to kill millions of people as a replacement for the British Empire, a justification for Britain remaining a powerful state rather than becoming a calm, civilised Scandinavian-style democracy: without nukes, he said, 'you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber'.

So there you have it. Without a nuclear weapon, Iran is another weird country holding the oil we all depend on. With it, they can negotiate on a slightly more equal footing. I know this is the politics of the madhouse, but we're all inmates…

I just need to get this off my chest

Barclays Bank, which is negotiating with the government for the taxpayer to insure their insanely risky investments, is a serial tax evader. Worse than that, it has an arm which specialises in shifting money around the world with the sole purpose of making money out of the taxpayer - about £1 billion pounds a year. The Guardian, despite having some dubious links to certain financial bodies, has been uncovering Barclays' web of deceitful trades, which the Inland Revenue haven't got the resources to follow.

This is what one financier said of Barclays' scheme, in the Financial Times:

I will say it was absolutely breathtaking, extraordinary. The depth of deceit, connivance and deliberate, artificial avoidance stunned me. The intricacy and artificiality of the scheme deeply was absolutely evident, as was the fact that the knew exactly what they were doing and why: to get money from one point in London to another without paying tax, via about 10 offshore companies. Simple, deliberate outcome, clearly stated, with the exact names of who was doing this, and no other purpose.

Until now I have been a supporter of the finance industry - I work with people there regularly and respect many of them, and greatly enjoy the Financial Times and other financial papers.

However this has shone a light on something for me, and made me certain that these people belong in jail, and companies like Barclays deserve to be bankrupt. They have robbed everyone of us,every single person who pays tax or who will ever pay tax in this country (and other countries!), through both the bailouts and schemes such as this.

Barclays' response is to ban publication of, and linking to, the leaked internal documents which revealed how they steal from us while begging for our help. So let's give a big hand to Wikileaks, which makes sure that leaked documents are never lost for good. You don't have to read them, just understand that this kind of activity is the Web's version of public service. The Guardian, like many companies which pay tax without trying to cheat, has a big office in London and responsibilities to employees and readers: it can't publish and be damned if the courts (yet again, acting solely for the powerful against the public interest) issue an injunction. Wikileaks, ironically, is like the dubious corporations who hide offshore (Walkers Crisps: a Swiss company now), and can post information out of reach of local courts.

These people are thieves. The Department of Work and Pensions is currently running an Orwellian campaign against benefit cheats who 'rob' the rest of us by falsely claiming the dole, or whatever. Fair enough - though living on £50 per week isn't exactly the same as having a Bond-villain style hideout. How about we conduct a similar campaign of persecution against these financiers? They steal far more than all the benefit cheats put together.

Some of their activities are illegal, and rely on the connivance of offshore states (Britain, ironically, encourages this behaviour onshore and offshore), and the poverty of the Inland Revenue - which sold its office to an offshore company which thus avoided tax. I can't express how angry this stuff makes me. I know all my friends think that I'm a boring old wanker for getting wound up by this, but it's important. These bankers and lawyers like their Chelsea mansions and airports and golf courses and private schools and all the other trimmings that makes life in Britain fantastic for the rich, but they're engaged in a concerted plot to make live worse for the rest of us: tax pays for roads and schools and infrastructure and child benefit and the NHS and pensions and clean air and universities and street lights and the police and the ambulance services and the firemen and the coastguard and so many things, so these bastards are stealing the high life and leaving us naive morons to pay for everything.

I have an enjoyable job and I'm paid fairly well (for now - half my contract expires in September), but I'll never be rich. There are, however, small ways in which I could get some tax back, quite legally. I don't do it. I believe that governments (even these gimps) are a good way to improve the lives of the citizens as a whole and it's our duty to contribute (which doesn't mean we shouldn't scream blue murder when it's wasted, as with Trident and ID cards). We have responsibilities to each other: my taxes pay for a binman's heart operation and his children's education and his taxes pay my salary. Everyone's a winner in the long term, which is why these tax-avoiding scum are thieving from us in exactly the same way as the benefit cheat: rich men have their bins emptied by the council the same as the rest of us. Their cleaners claim child benefit and their heart attack will be treated by an NHS nurse.

How's this for an idea? Ban non-domiciled or tax-avoiding executives from using public services. No bins emptied. Turned away from A+E. No road travel. No TV or radio. No calling the police, fire brigade or ambulance. No calling the council when the neighbours have a noisy party… we could wreck their lives until they're shamed into paying up.

Let's start with Lord Rothermere. He owns the Daily Mail, which hates governments but also hates foreigners and tax cheats. He lives in a massive, tasteless, reactionary, £50m mansion in Wiltshire which wasn't big enough so he's added another couple of wings to the building you see here.

Apparently, however, Donhead St. Andrew in Wiltshire is a foreign country. It must be because Private Eye (discussed here) has discovered that Rothermere is, for tax purposes, 'non-domiciled' and therefore doesn't pay UK tax on his £800m (inherited) fortune because his father lived in Paris. The Inland Revenue decided that this blatant theft wasn't worth investigating.

I must go for a little lie-down now.