Unlike SNP and Labour, Alba will never compromise on ditching Trident

With one hand he said the Scottish Government should be spending more money on health, on transport and everything else but on the other hand there was no extra money to give to Scotland to actually do this.

In one sentence, not even one day after the election, this senior Scottish Labour MP highlighted that Scottish Labour MPs will have no influence at Westminster where it really matters.

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of the new flock of Scottish Labour MPs are probably opposed to the renewal of Trident, that is the policy of Scottish Labour after all.

But when it comes to any votes at Westminster they’ll be herded through the lobby to vote for £205 billion to be spent on weapons of mass destruction while at the same time telling us there’s not enough money to scrap the bedroom tax, the two-child benefit cap or to restore Scottish industry.

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There are no Labour values in spending billions of pounds on a strategically pointless, morally absurd and military useless weapons system at the expense of feeding children and putting roofs over their heads.

The costs of the UK’s nuclear ambitions, be they human or financial, are enormous for a small peace seeking country like Scotland. Vast sums of money are taken from Scots’ taxes to pay for the UK Government’s global power posturing which could be put to far better use improving the lives of our people.

The past 60 years of maintaining the UK’s status as a nuclear power has constituted a grotesque waste of public resources that could and should have been deployed to create a fairer, more equal society. The UK Government should abandon the obscenity of its unaffordable nuclear weapons of mass destruction programme.

But they won’t. Whether we have a Labour government or a Tory government, nuclear weapons will be hosted on the Clyde at the expense of investment in health, housing, transport and jobs.

Bairns Not Bombs was one of the galvanising messages of the independence movement in the run-up the 2014 referendum.

The Scottish Labour MP Michael Shanks (Image: PA)

Had we won in 2014 then the regulation of all nuclear activity would now rest with an independent Scottish state and its parliamentarians. It would be us who would decide what was safe and what was not; we would decide the timetable for the removal of WMDs from Scottish shores.

The dogs in the street wouldn’t have believed back then that an SNP government under Alex Salmond would allow the British state to keep Trident on the Clyde for years after independence, but now we have one of the SNP’s most senior defence figures calling for his party to scrap its existing Trident policy and instead allow nuclear weapons to stay in Scotland for several years after independence.

That’s not a policy informed by fact but rather one that’s been influenced by far too close a relationship with the British military state. It’s what happens when SNP MPs spend years at Westminster wearing British military fatigues instead of settling up for Scotland.

Just imagine what sort of country we would live in today if our oil wealth wasn’t squandered and we weren’t forced to waste obscene amounts of money on nuclear weapons?

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The rotting hulls of Dreadnought subs retired in the 1980s have been rusting at Rosyth longer than they were in service. It costs £30 million a year to maintain their “storage” and future dismantling costs of the redundant fleet is expected to exceed a further £3 billion.

IN today’s prices, the Trident programme cost about £21bn, plus additional running costs of circa £3bn per annum. The estimated cost of the replacement Dreadnought class submarines is an eye-watering £31bn, plus a further £10bn contingency, and in-service costs expected to continue at about 6% of MoD expenditure.

Over the next 30 years, the Trident replacement programme will cost more than £200bn.

That’s the equivalent of building 400 hospitals. It’s the A9 duelled 100 times. It would be cheaper to give every home in Scotland a 24 carat gold plated front door than it would be to renew Trident. And these figures will only go up. Even the National Audit Office has raised concerns over the affordability of the Ministry of Defence’s overall equipment plan. But these astronomical figures continue to be spent on our behalf because it’s what Rule Britannia wants.

At HMNB Clyde and RNAD Coulport there were 15 recorded radiation leaks and a further 43 at Faslane in 2023 alone – and these are the ones the MoD admits to.

Scottish Labour MPs won’t stand up in opposition to Trident and the independence movement will not look kindly on the SNP calls to compromise on Trident. Alba want to see nuclear weapons removed from Scotland from day one of independence.

It’s a position endorsed by the former chair of UK CND and confirmed as viable by people that have actually walked across the gangway onto submarines and watched as nuclear warheads are mated on to their delivery systems.

When it comes to ridding Scotland of nuclear weapons, Alba Party will never compromise. On the contrary, it should be an integral part of the case for why Scotland must become an independent nation as speedily as possible.