The future of Trident is one of those issues which seem to fire up passion and rhetoric while generating precious little in the way of factual, reasoned debate.
It is therefore a credit to the good sense of the Scottish people that despite constant grandstanding and bluster from politicians, opinion poll after opinion poll has shown that most people agree with the need to maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
I have been consistent in my views during my seventeen years as an MSP.
I respect the position of those who believe in unilateral disarmament but I do not believe that giving up our nuclear weapons alone would persuade the rest of the world to take action.
History tells us that the only way we can hope to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons is by negotiating them away with other countries.
The last Labour Government was the first to commit to a nuclear-free world and we made significant progress towards Global Zero.
It was Labour ministers who took the decisions to dismantle the UK’s air-borne nuclear weapon system and more than halve the number of operationally available nuclear warheads.
As a result of multilateral agreements, the US and Russia now hold almost 75% fewer warheads than they did at the peak of the Cold War and the UK’s stockpiles have fallen from nearly 500 in the 1980s to just over 200 today.
This is clear proof that multilateral disarmament is working.
People expect maturity and responsibility from politicians and the choices they make.
They expect us, rightly, to consider the consequences of our actions. It is therefore important that we also reflect on the impact on the many people who work at the Faslane and Coulport bases.
There has always been much contention about the numbers of people employed at the base with the SNP deliberately trying to downplay the size of the workforce.
But the facts are clear.
According to the official MOD figures, 6,800 are directly employed by the Royal Navy and its contractors. A further 4,500 jobs are dependent on the base through the supply chain and the local economy.
On top of that, the MOD expects the directly employed workforce to rise by 2000 in the next few years when Faslane becomes the sole base for the UK’s whole submarine fleet.
So that’s over 13,000 jobs linked to the base.
Those who wish to scrap Trident are either unwilling or unable to set out a concrete plan for how each of these jobs would be replaced.
The workers on the ground at Faslane and Coulport know what the consequences are for their jobs. The convener of shop stewards told the Scottish Affairs Committee that ‘if the submarines are not there, there is no work for us.’
In other words, if Trident is not there, there is no strategic reason for having a naval base at Faslane.
I know that there are people who genuinely believe that defence diversification provides a solution but the workers at the base completely disagree.
They have described diversification as a ‘utopian land of employment’ and said that they may as well start applying for jobs in Brigadoon. The reality is, we’ve tried diversification
before and it simply does not work.
This vote on Monday is therefore a clear choice between building the replacement submarines and supporting jobs or scrapping Trident without a plan for future jobs.
Labour MPs will have a free vote tomorrow in recognition of the strength of feeling on both sides of this debate. I welcome the overwhelming vote at the Unite conference in Brighton this week urging MPs to back renewal.
They join the GMB in being sceptical about the pie in the sky claims made about alternative jobs. There is absolutely no chance of a Tory government standing up for blue collar workers in our manufacturing and defence sectors in the event of a vote to scrap Trident tomorrow.
The communities surrounding Faslane, Rosyth, Barrow, and elsewhere would go the same way as the countless other towns dependent on heavy industries which were cast aside by Margaret Thatcher.
The only difference these days is that the enemies of the workers in these industries are now principally to be found in the SNP.
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