Can Starmer be trusted with Trident?

Three weeks after the Prime Minister visited Barrow-in-Furness to pose with models of submarines, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has made his way to BAE Systems in Cumbria to emphasise his support for the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent. He penned an accompanying manifesto for the Daily Mail, in which he said his party’s commitment to Trident was ‘total’ and ‘unshakeable’. He also expressed a ‘a cast-iron commitment’ to build the four new Dreadnought-class nuclear submarines which will carry Britain’s ballistic missiles from the early 2030s onwards.

This is politics. Starmer remembers that at the last election barely one in ten voters trusted the Labour party on defence and national security. He also knows that, with Russian forces occupying swathes of eastern Ukraine, Iran and Israel shadow-boxing in the Middle East and Houthi militants threatening maritime trade in the Red Sea, the world feels even less secure than it did five years ago.