David Blagden

The House of Commons is set to vote later today on the principle of sustaining the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. Ubiquitously dubbed 'Trident', the vote is actually on the merits or otherwise of replacing the Royal Navy’s current fleet of four Vanguard-class submarines (SSBNs) that carry the Trident D5 ballistic missile with a like-for-like replacement, dubbed Successor. Such a vote is already overdue: Tony Blair’s 2006 White Paper recommended that development of a new SSBN class should begin to enter service in the early 2020s, a target that has already slipped by a decade, if safe and secure continuous at-sea deterrence (CASD) patrols are to be sustained. Today’s vote is in some ways less momentous than it seems.

Michael Fallon’s confirmation last week that a Strategic Defence and Security Review is underway adds another question to the Conservatives’ growing list of slim-majority headaches: what to do about defence policy. With George Osborne hitting the Ministry of Defence with the second-largest pre-Budget cuts of any government department earlier this month, and Number 10 reportedly looking for ‘creative’ accounting measures to cover the fact that Britain will no longer meet NATO’s defence spending target, hopes that defence might escape further cuts have quickly evaporated. So the fact that the coming Spending Review is unlikely to deliver a rosy outcome for the MOD is already well known.