How to save the planet

In his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes Winston Churchill’s famous warning in 1936. Admonishing those who were ‘only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent’, Churchill declared: ‘The era of procrastination, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.’

It is not surprising that Mr Gore and his green disciples should find this quotation alluring in their campaign for radical action against environmental change. But Churchill’s words are still resonant — or should be — in the debate on 21st-century global defence. How many politicians in this country are deaf to the lesson of his warning was depressingly clear in this week’s debate on Trident.

The Commons vote on Wednesday may well be an augury of things to come. If Labour scrapes home at the next election with a small majority, or cobbles together a coalition with the Lib Dems, it will be deeply vulnerable to such revolts, and frequently dependent upon enlightened Tory support.