I did a double take when listening to the radio yesterday: was I really hearing the latest development in Labour’s tangled defence review?
It turns out my ears were not deceiving me. Jeremy Corbyn had really suggested we might keep the Trident submarines that form our nuclear deterrent, but that they wouldn’t carry the missiles anymore. The justification seems to be that the Japanese do something similar.
Nicola Sturgeon argues coherently against replacing trident, and takes the job issue head-on saying the SNP would create new jobs to replace those that would be lost. It’s a credible argument, whether we agree with it or not. But this latest proposal from Jeremy Corbyn seems to represent the worst of all worlds – we carry on running a redundant set of submarines just to protect the jobs.
At a time when we desperately need a strong opposition to take on the government, I despair.