Green Party condemns Labour support for ‘HMS Pointless’
11 May 2017
The Green Party has responded to the pledge in Labour’s leaked draft manifesto to retain the Trident nuclear weapon system [1]. The Greens have already pledged to scrap Trident and spend its £3.6bn per year running costs on the NHS [2].
Jonathan Bartley, Green Party co-leader, said:
“Labour’s stance on Trident is both deeply disappointing and self-evidently absurd. What could be more illogical that pledging to renew a multibillion pound nuclear weapons system that will never be used? With people struggling to get by in Britain it’s inexcusable to be wasting people’s money on this cold war relic.
“Instead of funding HMS Pointless we could plough billions of pounds into our health service, hiring 85,000 more nurses, midwives and other NHS staff. Labour has acknowledged that nuclear weapons would result in the ‘indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent civilians’ [3] yet refuses to see sense and pledge to scrap Trident. Real security means having a world class health service, not locking ourselves into replacing obsolete, useless weapons.”
Notes:
- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/11/leaker-draft-manifesto-jeremy-corbyn-labour-trident
- https://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2017/05/04/greens-tories-and-labour-offer-a-choice-between-first-strike-fanaticism-or-hms-pointless/
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/10/labour-extremely-cautious-trident-would-deploy-troops-last-resort/