Last weeks announcement by the MoD that Scotland would now be the location for the entire nuclear submarine fleet couldn't have come at a worse time. The Scottish people don't want it, the military doesn't want it, now even the Tories don't want it! So why as they face meltdown in the polls are Labour, pursuing a policy opposed by four out of five of the Scottish electorate?
This week the MoD announced: ‘Ministry of Defence documents suggest that the seven Trafalgar class submarines currently based in Devon will be relocated to Faslane on the Gare Loch near Glasgow by 2015′. But earlier in the same week another general, Sir Hugh Beach, the former deputy commander-in-chief of UK land forces, summed up the UK's Trident missile system succinctly: "It's no bloody use. Let's not waste money on it." (letter to The Times on 16 January 2009)
Another of the top brass, Lord Bramall, has also recently stated: "Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism. Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics."
In this context Gordon Brown's commitment to Trident 2 is not just anti-democratic and potentially politically suicidal but strategically flawed. The costs - an estimated £110 billion - is surely a guaranteed vote loser for any party struggling to contain national economic collapse. The odd thing is that it's not just the STUC, the churches, the Scottish Parliament, the sitting Govt and the wider general populace that are against it - so are most of the Labour Party in Scotland
Not only this but investigations forced into the public realm by FOI requests have shown that Faslane is a nightmare of safety, security and contamination. In its own internal reports and its complaints to Faslane, Sepa's frustrations with the base's handling of its repeated safety failings are made increasingly clear. They reveal a substantial breakdown in trust involving Sepa and Faslane's commanders. Those anxieties culminated with the leak of radioactive effluent from HMS Torbay in February last year. That was the third leak into the Clyde in four years: waste had been discharged from HMS Trafalgar in 2004, and from HMS Superb in 2007 - an incident was only detected after the leak occurred.
As the Sunday Herald's Rob Edwards has written: "After each earlier incident, Sepa had issued the MoD at Faslane with warning letters and each time the base had promised to improve its practices." But the Torbay incident suggested those promises had not been honoured: it was "of utmost concern as it demonstrates a number of inadequacies in radioactive waste management practices at HMNB Clyde, Faslane," the agency stated. It represented "a failure by MoD to act in accordance with a number of the conditions set down" in a letter of agreement from 1993. The agency again wrote to Faslane, asking them to act as if Sepa had the same legal powers at the base as its does over Scotland's nuclear power plants. "For incidents of this nature in the civil sector it is standard practice for Sepa to consider regulatory action such as an enforcement notice," the agency told the MoD."
The English media and political classes may have convinced themselves that somehow the banking collapse has sunk the independence movement, but the facts, inconveniently, don't bear this up. Two weeks ago a YouGov poll showed public support for the SNP is soaring on the eve of the second anniversary of the Party's rise to power in Scotland. The lead is well ahead of anything the Party has experienced in recent months - seven points for Holyrood at constituency level and nine points for the regional list vote. The results showed the SNP at their best level for six months and Labour at their worst in that period. Unionist politicians repeat the mantra of the ‘arc of insolvency' as if the collapse of the financial sector reduces the self-determination movement redundant. Yet in many peoples eyes all it makes redundant is the credibility of the free market model pedalled by New Labour.
All of which leaves you with the profoundly disturbing question, is Gordon Brown gambling Britain's nuclear defence to save the union? In a time of crisis this manipulation of peoples worst fears about job losses when he should have Britains strategic interests at heart is shockingly cynical.
Or, as Ian Bell writing in todays Sunday Herald puts it: "Labour is providing jobs in the mass murder business".
"I have a little trouble when I hear the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland mock his Nationalist opponent with the formulation that nukes = jobs. Iain Gray said as much the other week. In the case of Faslane, the usual round number ranges between 10,000 and 11,000. That's employment. But is also implies a lot of death for someone. Who would that be? We're not supposed to kill Russians, currently. It's bad for business, and bad for the gas supplies. So we are offered Iranians, North Koreans, and - villains in the wings - some Pakistani Taliban who might make it to Karachi, and find "the Button". So Scotland, as a wholly rational response, must become the home-from-home for our very own nuclear flotilla? It never made much sense. So the badly-kept secret concerning the nuclear boats, Scotland, and radioactive garbage feels like a political gesture. It smacks of provocation. How might an "anti-nuclear" SNP reject all those jobs? But why, alternatively, would a Westminster government implant a key defence element in a territory with a nationalist tendency?"
Labour calculates that in these tough times jobs are a big player as fear of unemployment rises again: ‘It's about the economy stupid'. "Good news for the Clyde," says Bob Ainsworth, minister for our armed forces. A "great move for Scotland," says Jim Sheridan, another of those Scottish MPs you may have forgotten. A "great boost to Scotland", says Iain Gray, from Holyrood.
Bell, one of Scotland's finest journalists (in an admittedly an uncompetitive field) concludes:
"Is it still presumed that time-served people will discard morality for a shift? And is this a mere bribe? When do we get to emerge from the dark ages? A "great boost to Scotland" is not, I think, an exercise in summoning the best-qualified extermination squad on the planet. Meanwhile, locking my country into the union might be better achieved through democratic virtue, if any, than by treating us as a mercenary clientele."
For many in Scotland - not just nationalists and republicans but the peace movement of civil society, Trident 2 is a reminder of what being tied to the British State means in reality. Scotland is tethered to a political state still obsessed with its status and this can be defined only by its military hardware. This is true whether its the cluster bomb base in Leuchars, the annual bombing of Cape Wrath, the DU shelling at Dundrennan, the Raytheon base in Glenrothes or the multitude of secret military bases that pepper the Scottish countryside.
Gambling that jobs in defence in a discredited weapons system as an anti-nuclear US President comes into office seems like the desperate gamble of a Labour Government in terminal decline.
