Burnham’s right-hand woman and the Cabinet minister in with responsibility for national security has repeatedly opposed Trident and backed full unilateral nuclear disarmament. While Burnham re-announces a £8.4 billion investment in the UK’s nuclear deterrent…
Oversight of national security policy coordination belongs to Louise Haigh, who will be running the new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It’s the all-powerful Cabinet Office with the useless HR functions taken out…
Burnham is in Barrow-in-Furness today to do a repeat announcement of investment in the UK’s nuclear arsenal. His minister in charge of national security happens to think it should be dismantled…
In 2015 Haigh was reported to say of Trident: “investment in nuclear is immoral in and of itself.” Before Corbyn’s first Party Conference in 2015 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – run by communists who argued for unilateral Western disarmament in the Cold War – cited Haigh as a supporter.
Speaking at a Campaign Against Climate Change conference in Sheffield in 2015, Haigh said the following:
“There are issues on the table that have not been debated in the Labour Party since before I was born, Trident, membership of NATO and a real alternative to austerity. It’s a very, very exciting time and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be a part of it.”
Writing in the Guardian in support of Owen Smith in the 2016 challenge to Corbyn’s leadership, Haigh said of the Labour leader:
“Jeremy and I share the same politics. We have voted in the same lobby in parliament on every vote since I was elected – on welfare cuts, Syria, refugees, Trident and workers’ rights. These beliefs are shared by thousands of members, trade unionists, councillors and MPs.”
In the House of Commons in 2016 she asked of a fellow anti-Trident Labour MP: “Does my honourable friend not share my concern that this latest round of renewal makes it difficult to ignore the fact that we are moving against our international duty into an era of permanent armament?”
Opposing the renewal of Trident is one thing. Haigh has gone further and campaigned for total nuclear disarmament. In 2019 she signed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s ‘Parliamentary Pledge’ which committed them “to working within parliament to promote the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” This UN Treaty, which the UK has not signed, would make all of Britain’s nuclear arsenal immediately illegal…
In 2023 the Mail reported that Haigh pledged to “work for the ratification of the TPNW” and vowed to “eliminate these inhumane and abhorrent weapons” because their abolition is “an essential step to promote the security and well-being of all peoples.”
Someone call MI5, MI6 – in fact, do a round robin…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”