By Rab Bruce’s Spider

Labour’s muddled and inconsistent position on Trident has been well documented by others but some of our contributors have made some valid points which I thought I’d try to summarise here just so we are all clear on what is happening.

Labour, it must be remembered, spent two years campaigning to keep control of all decisions on Defence at Westminster. The vote at their Scottish Conference is therefore meaningless. While it puts their MSPs and solitary MP in a difficult position and should provide us with plenty of laughs as Kezia Dugdale and Jackie Baillie, both of whom are ardent supporters of Trident, try to realign themselves with their Party membership’s new decision, it really doesn’t matter because it is UK Labour who call the shots and they are in favour of renewing Trident. Whether that position alters between now and when the vote on spending the money is taken is anybody’s guess.

But, as for Scottish Labour, their much-trumpeted reason for retaining Trident was the fact that so many jobs relied on it. Putting aside the fact that Jackie Baillie has put forward some very dodgy statistics on just how many local jobs rely on the Faslane base, the very argument itself must surely be challenged. Are we really saying that a few thousand jobs are worth keeping simply in order to maintain a first strike Armageddon weapons system which, if used, could trigger the end of the world and, if not used, could still result in a catastrophic accident that would virtually wipe out Scotland’s largest centre of population? Is that really a justifiable argument from a moral perspective? To look at a similar case from a couple of hundred years ago, should the slave trade have been maintained in order to preserve the jobs of the slave traders, ship’s crews who transported slaves from Africa and the manufacturers of iron shackles? The idea is preposterous but the case for Trident is even more ridiculous on moral grounds, let alone practical ones.

Trident is a status symbol; nothing more, nothing less. The UK could not and would not launch a nuclear attack without America’s say so. It is a colossal waste of money simply in order to maintain prestige. As for Labour’s idea that multilateral disarmament is preferable, that is the sort of delusional thinking that the phrase, "Fantasy politics" could have been made for. Russia and the USA are never going to disarm their nuclear weapons. Whether Britain does so or not will not make the slightest bit of difference except that becoming a non-nuclear country and making a great show of that might just persuade other countries that we are making some effort to rid ourselvesof the perception that we are imperialistic warmongers.

The simple fact is that, without the vast resources of the Empire to bolster the UK’s finances and with the annihilation of our manufacturing industries over the past decades, Britain cannot afford the enormous cost of its favourite status symbol. Spending billions on renewing Trident would be folly when there are so many British citizens living in poverty. That’s the bottom line and it is sad that Labour politicians in Scotland need to be reminded of it by their rank and file members.