Starmer just 'GAVE AWAY' the UK’s nuclear deterrent to Biden.

Right, so the UK nuclear deterrent, our nuclear weapons system collectively known as Trident, a cost of £205bn being the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament estimate when replacing Trident was voted through in 2016, now, here in 2024 they manufacturing phase of that is about to begin according to a House of Commons Library report titled The cost of the UK’s nuclear deterrent’ which was published just at the end of last month, which does actually reference those CND figures, though doesn’t straightforwardly actually answer the question in it’s title.
But it isn’t so much the cost in and of itself that this video is about, it is more to do with the fact that even before it is actually fully renewed, Keir Starmer has basically gift wrapped it and tied it all in a bow and handed it over to the US. Within the first three weeks of Starmer becoming PM, in one of his first foreign policy moves, our so-called independent nuclear deterrent, functionally is no longer ours, because he signed it away.
Right, so whether you support the idea of the UK having a nuclear arsenal a so called deterrent, our part to play in Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, if anyone is ever daft enough to actually try and use a nuke, or whether you vehemently disagree with the notion of such things existing, let alone us having them, when so many other countries get along fine without them, and I certainly fall into this category, when it is our money being used to operate, maintain, replace these things, you kind of at least expect some semblance of ownership over such things.
To an extent this has always been a lie. Although we’ve owned these things going back decades inverted commas, there has always been a reliance on the US due to a treaty we have with them going back to 1958, an anagram of MAD weirdly enough called the Mutual Defence Agreement of MDA. Without this, there would be no Trident. The US supplies the nuclear weapons materials used along with the expertise without which Trident could never get off the ground, be maintained, be operated safely. Even the Trident missiles themselves, which give their name to the entire program, come from the US, so first and foremost there is an argument that this system costs so much because it’s purchased from another state and who we are totally reliant on to keep the system operational end to end. It’s our money spent, but that seems to be the crux of our involvement with it and in all the years since, despite repeated governments insisting on our need to keep these rancid, unusable, inordinately expensive things, we’ve continued to allow the US to basically be the suppliers.
So with this in mind, how has Keir Starmer handed over to the US what is basically their gear and without their say-so can’t be used anyway as some of you watching this will no doubt be thinking. Well £205bn of our money is locked up in it after all, if you take those CND figures as read, but it comes back to that Mutal Defence Agreement. You see there is a clause in it, which requires the treaty to basically be renewed every ten years, a so-called sunset clause, so the treaty could be ended if there was a desire to, a built in expiry date to it if you like. Well that is what Starmer via his defence secretary John Healey have now removed. There is no longer an expiry date to this treaty, we are now completely committed to nuclear armament for as long as the US is, a new line has been written into it, a memorandum, which now reads:
“To make the entirety of the MDA enduring, securing continuing cooperation with the US”.
It also goes onto say:
“The MDA provides the necessary requirements for the control and transmission of submarine nuclear propulsion technology, atomic information and material between the UK and US, and the transfer of non-nuclear components to the UK.”
“The MDA underpins the defence nuclear relationship between the UK and US.”
Every ten years we had a window of opportunity to pull the plug, to renegotiate our position regarding the MDA and the contract if you like with the US and now we no longer do, we’ve erased that, given it away and so for as much as the US had a massive say in between those ten year renewals anyway, now they do ongoing for a completely indeterminate space of time and all of this was done by Keir Starmer within 3 weeks of coming to power, a man who has said nuclear weapons are the bedrock of our defence arsenal, frightening words given they can never be any such thing, they can never possibly be used unless we are determined to wipe ourselves out as a species.
Naturally the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has had their say on this, you can imagine they will have and what Starmer has done has been laid out in no uncertain terms by their spokesperson when they were interviewed on this story by Declassified UK, once more covering a story no mainstream have said a peep about:
‘Kate Hudson from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) told Declassified: “This spells farewell to even the smallest notion of parliamentary responsibility for Britain’s foreign and defence policies.”
She added that at least nominally parliament has had the opportunity, once a decade, to debate and reconsider America’s role in Britain’s nuclear programme.
“This amendment, introduced in the most undemocratic fashion by the government – at a time when it will be lost in the recess and party conference season – will eradicate those opportunities. This must not go unchallenged.”
The change was agreed by senior British and US officials on 25 July, three weeks after Keir Starmer became UK prime minister.’
It’s long been argued that UK foreign policy is actually made in the US and there you have CND basically repeating that line too, except now our defence policy is made in the US as well.
If we ever wanted to for example, develop our own truly independent nuclear deterrent, not that we ever have that I’m aware of and not that I would support it, we now can’t because we’ve handed responsibility for that to the US.
Also of note is the undemocratic method by which parliament are doing this, allowing recess and conference season to shut down parliament and so mean parliament cannot debate this matter. It’s very much one of those things you will have to get in touch with your MP about and demand they do or say something to kick off about the fast one Starmer is pulling in essentially handing responsibility for our nuclear deterrent to the US.
How can this possibly go through without any debate or scrutiny? Surely such a massive issue as our nuclear deterrent has got to be debated?
Well here again our foreign and defence policy weaknesses come to the fore. None of this has any statutory basis in the UK. All of it is written into US law and we have a once in every ten years get out clause from that, which the UK under Starmer is now getting rid of, so we have absolutely no say in getting out of it should we ever want to in future and this is what I mean by the UK essentially handing over the UK’s nuclear deterrent to the US, we no longer have any say in it, not that we had a lot to begin with. Declassified UK also spoke to the organisation Nukewatch UK, which tracks and monitors the movement of British WMDs from Aldermaston in Berkshire, which is home to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, where much of the nuclear material provided to manufacture British warheads arrives at from the US, to Coulport in Scotland, where UK nuclear warheads are stored. Their spokesperson said:
‘Peter Burt of Nukewatch UK which monitors the UK’s nuclear weapons programme commented: “Every UK Prime Minister since the Second World War has been petrified about losing influence with the US, and in a large part this hinges around access to nuclear weapons technology and military intelligence.
“This is the main reason the UK government always aligns itself with US foreign policy and allows itself to be drawn into US military adventurism, even when it is clearly not in the interests of this country to follow America.”’
I imagine few people disagree with that assessment given how many times since the second world war this country has been dragged into a US led conflict, some Prime Ministers more eager than others, Tony Blair and the Iraq War probably the first that would come to many minds, certainly my mind and now we have a Prime Minister in Keir Starmer who appears to be even more excited at the prospect of military intervention than he was and certainly so keen to curry favour with the US, he’s just signed away our right to ever have a say in having a nuclear deterrent pretty much ever again and all of it seems to be in the mindset of success governments being too gutless to ever having an independent foreign policy of their own and that doesn’t necessarily have to be just in light of our nuclear deterrent, but can equally be applied to what is happening in Gaza, because it seems until and unless the US say enough is enough and cut Israel off completely, the UK won’t either. I guarantee if the US had, we would be cancelling a damn sight more than just 8.2% of all our arms sales contracts to Israel right now but of course we aren’t are we? It’s a big old scandal in and of itself and gets even worse the more you dig down into it as this video recommendation for your suggested next watch will tell you all about and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.