Departmental questions in the House of Commons are generally an opportunity for backbenchers of all parties to hold the government to account. But a strange pattern is emerging at Defence Questions, whereby the backbenchers of each of the two main parties pour their efforts into making life uncomfortable for their own frontbenchers, even though Labour’s team isn’t actually in government.
So today Michael Fallon and his ministers had to contend with complaints from Sir Edward Leigh about the suggestion that Britain leaving the European Union would harm Britain’s national security. But Emily Thornberry, who is supposed to focus her fire and that of her party on ministers, had to deal with an even stronger barrage of grumbling from her own Labour colleagues about her stance on Trident, with John Woodcock arguing that ‘those who remain true to the spirit of Attlee’ would continue to support the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, and Kevan Jones warning that those who thought there was an ‘easy option to cancel this programme’ needed to confront the fact that such a cancellation would be ‘disastrous’ not just for the defence of the country but also for jobs.
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