Tam Dalyell: There are stormy days ahead if Mr Blair backs this dangerous folly

'It is more important to resist Son of Star Wars than to keep this Prime Minister in office'

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Labour revolt on missile defence

In the summer of 1962, when I first arrived in the House of Commons, the atmosphere in the Parliamentary Labour Party was still pretty poisonous. Bitter dissensions over German re-armament, the Bomb and the Aldermaston marches lingered on. The basic cause of all this was that many substantial members of the PLP felt passionately about nuclear weapons – and placed their beliefs higher than party unity.

I predict that if this Prime Minister insists on supporting Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, and Vice-President Dick Cheney – for they are the architects of President George Bush's National Missile Defence – stormy days will return to the PLP, the like of which we have not witnessed since the 1960s.

Whether, if it came to a crunch, a majority of Labour MPs would actually cast a vote in the parliamentary lobby against the Government on the issue is another matter. If they were to do so, Mr Blair would have to find his endorsement for the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush proposal from Conservative MPs. I am told that no Liberal MP would be prepared to support Mr Blair and Geoffrey Hoon, the Defence Secretary, against Labour critics of "Son of Star Wars" in a Commons vote.

What makes one suppose that there would be serious party dissent – dissent is the right word, not rebellion – over Son of Star Wars? Normally I'm one of those who nods his head sagely and says he will believe in a Government majority being cut substantially only when he sees it.

There is, above all, the genuine gut feeling of many Labour MPs. Out of our past, we believe that the militarisation of space is wrong – and supremely dangerous. If it were not so, the most significant Commons early day motion – a parliamentary weather vane – of recent times containing an astonishing 276 signatures gathered by Malcolm Savidge would not be standing on the Order Paper. It reads: "That this House expresses concern at President Bush's intention to move beyond the constraints of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in developing missile defence: and endorses the unanimous conclusion of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee which recommended that the Government voice the grave doubts about NMD in the UK." Alas, MPs do not always vote in accordance with the spirit of the early day motions which they themselves have signed. Yet don't suppose that the men and women of the Parliamentary Labour Party ever were as compliant as has been made out. As I have got to know them in the last four years, they have minds of their own. The epithet "Blair Babes" always was unfair claptrap. The truth was that they felt that our party had been out of office for 18 years, and that we had been punished by the electorate for disunity. Few issues justified voting against the Government in the lobbies, however mistaken many new MPs believed the policy to have been. In a second term, the feeling that "we must not do anything to rock the boat" has diminished, if not evaporated.

Besides, there is another seismic change in the attitude of the PLP. Understandably, men and women who move into a new job for the first time do not want to start in their new and unfamiliar surroundings by being hell-raisers. Second-termers are likely to act rather differently from first-termers, not least because a significant number who quite honourably aspired to be considered for a ministerial position now realise that they are likely to be passed over and now have fewer inhibitions about dirtying their political noses and voting in Parliament according to what they really believe.

Furthermore, there may be a problem in this particular instance about failing to dirty political noses on the Son of Star Wars issue. Many loyal, sensible, balanced Labour Party members and office bearers in constituency Labour parties feel extremely strongly about a militarisation of space. If their MP votes to support Mr Blair in his support of Mr Bush, some invaluable activists will simply not work in a 2005 general election, and others might even voice their anger by attempts at deselection in 2003.

They are genuinely frightened by the American scheme. They understand the system has to operate automatically, or if not, potentially catastrophic decisions have to be made within 20 seconds.

I chaired the session of the British Association meeting in Glasgow last Tuesday, where Professor William Gosling of the University of Bath gave a presentation to the History of Science Section on electronic warfare. Never before has response time had to be truncated to a matter of seconds. This is new in the annals of human conflict. And I am struck by the number of people in the Labour Party who heard Alistair Cooke giving a chilling talk in his Letter from America and raising at least a case to be answered on the safety of the technology which apparently may have been buttressed by cynically rigged tests.

Many Labour Party members are appalled by another aspect. Is a Labour government really going to endorse the policy of an extremely right-wing United States Republican administration when there is a chance that the Democrats might be able to block it, on account of Senator Jefford's crossing of the Senate floor? Is it right that a Labour government should undermine the legitimate criticisms made of the policy by Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl Klein, the chairman of the Defence Committee, and Tom Daschle, majority leader in the Senate?

There is also an awful suspicion that the Prime Minister has indeed undertaken to Mr Bush that he would support him on NMD but that it was too difficult to do so just at the moment, on account of problems with the left. There is in my view every good reason why the Prime Minister's fears of the TUC and the Labour Party conference should be realised with knobs on. If the reaction at the TUC and of the party conference is anything like that which I expect, it will focus the minds of many Labour MPs on whether they ought to support Mr Blair – I do not say the Government because there are many in the Government who privately harbour the same doubts about NMD as I do – or their constituency parties, which will determine whether they remain candidates in 2005. I am one of those who believe that doing what we can to resist this dangerous folly is more important than keeping this Prime Minister in No 10 Downing Street.

The author is Labour MP for Linlithgow