Since Harold Wilson became the first Labour prime minister at the head of a nuclear-armed United Kingdom six decades ago, the party has pitted itself against two opposed political forces. Against a Conservative Party enamoured with delusional notions about reasserting British hegemony, Labour has insisted that American leadership should go unchallenged. Against a Left hostile to both NATO and the development and maintenance of a nuclear program, Labour has conjured up undemocratic ways of suppressing such views.

In the manifesto for Labour’s victorious 1964 election campaign, Wilson’s party railed against Tory attempts to ensure that Britain’s nuclear program was independent from NATO decision-making. Nuclear weapons, the party argued, ought to be “under effective political control so that all partners in the alliance have a proper share in their deployment and control.” What this meant in practice was, of course, American control. The same year, Wilson and his defense minister, Denis Healey, lied to fellow MPs in order to build Polaris, the United Kingdom’s nuclear submarine program, by claiming that construction had already begun and that stopping the process would be more costly than continuing.

Not much has changed in the sixty years since Wilson took office. The party still finds itself navigating between two positions that it deems irrational: the “irresponsibility” of a Left that demands democratic oversight over decisions to go to war, and the hubris of a Tory party unwilling to accept Britain’s diminished role on the world stage.