A COUPLE of things have become very clear, very quickly – hopefully even to the most politically disinterested of folk – about the way Labour is choosing to present its political messages from Downing Street. Firstly, there’s the attempts to claim that having now “audited the books”, the finances of the UK Government are “much worse’ than they were expecting.

Consequently, we are told, big spending cuts will be necessary and all because of the Tories. That’s except for viewers in Scotland, however, where Labour will try to represent the impact of their Westminster spending cuts for Scotland as being the result of “SNP austerity”.

It doesn’t matter that countering the impact of 15 years of Tory austerity with further years of Labour austerity is economically incoherent. It doesn’t even matter to them that their political narrative is dishonest and very visibly at odds with branch managerial urgings to “read my lips”, or even that Holyrood lacks the powers needed to mitigate against further poor choices being made for us elsewhere.

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No. Just so long as enough people are willing to buy their story right now, Labour reckon they will get away with it and in the process, earn a reputation for being a “responsible” government, no matter what the societal impact of their approach to public spending.

Secondly, in defending those cuts, Labour are also embracing the hand-wringing pieties so beloved of the Tories. “Tough choices” are “necessary” we are told and “won’t be shied away from”. Especially when – as with the Winter Fuel Allowance – the brunt of those choices end up falling on the softest of targets.

Labour’s desire to demonstrate how responsible it is on tax and spend should be familiar to anyone who remembers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, even if the chosen refrain is now that things can only get worse. Nevertheless, it can hardly be said to represent the “change” that was so noisily promised to voters in Scotland by Labour candidates who are now poised to troop obediently through the lobbies to vote these cuts through.

Former Labour leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (Image: BBC/Getty/Johnny Eggitt)

There’s one public expenditure black hole however which remains absolutely untouchable for both Labour and the Conservatives and that is Trident. In fact, it’s not only necessary for any Prime Ministerial hopeful to commit to spending unquantified billions on nuclear weapons into the future, it’s also a test of political virility in Middle England to be willing to say publicly – whether true or not – that they would be willing to “push the button” if the UK’s interests were in some way at threat.

It’s hard to describe a commitment to retaining or using nuclear weapons as virtue signalling given that it signals no virtue whatsoever.

It is as though an act of empty if ruinously expensive gesture politics, the only purpose of which is to try and reassure those who still have a need to believe that the UK “punches above its weight”, rather than facing up to the reality of being a second-tier regional power in long-term economic and military decline. It's also not at all clear who or exactly what Trident is any longer supposed to deter.

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However, while it’s long been obvious that the resources required to sustain Trident prevent the UK from defending its own citizens from poverty, it’s now increasingly clear that the resource it swallows up not only undermines the ability of the UK to defend itself and its allies, but also increasingly undermines the integrity of Trident itself.

At any time, at least one of the four Trident submarines is on patrol somewhere in the North Atlantic providing so-called Continuous at Sea Deterrence. However, in order to keep that vessel protected at sea from hostile submarines, a significant commitment of conventional air and sea defence support is also required.

And here’s where Britain’s patriotic punch above our weight-ers should be really concerned. For according to reports, at present, only nine out of 16 Royal Navy surface warships are either active or deployed. Meanwhile, not a single one of the navy’s six conventionally armed submarines is available to go to sea. Let’s give the UK Government enough credit to assume that it isn’t allowing hundreds of billions of pounds of nuclear deterrence to potentially be crept up on and destroyed by a single torpedo from an undetected Russian submarine.

Yet for that to be the case, the UK must currently be relying on the submarines of other Nato nations to protect the sea around where that single Trident submarine is out on patrol.

File photo of a nuclear submarine at Faslane (Image: Getty Images)

Putting public services under unnecessary strain to maintain Britain’s nuclear status symbol is one thing. But when the UK can’t even independently defend its supposedly independent nuclear deterrent, then the continuing commitment to Trident and its replacement really does reach new levels of absurdity.

The conflict in Ukraine shows the need for the development of modern, advanced conventional forces as the best way of defending against aggression. The ability to meet that basic evolving need is being placed at risk because of the amount of resource being misdirected to keep weapons of mass destruction on the Clyde.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a Labour government chose to almost bankrupt the UK by pursuing the development of an atom bomb.

The then foreign secretary Ernest Bevin notoriously tried to justify it by saying: “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.”

Then as now, choosing nuclear weapons was to choose flag waving and an imagined global status, all at the expense of genuine security and higher living standards at home. Clearly, that instinct remains every bit as strong in today’s Labour’s leadership.