It’s perhaps not a surprise that Scottish Labour will oppose Trident renewal in the party’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections. The party did hold a symbolic vote on the matter at its conference last autumn, and delegates voted against renewal of the nuclear deterrent, despite Kezia Dugdale’s own preference for multilateral disarmament.
And it’s not a surprise that this has enraged trade union GMB Scotland, which is pushing for a vote in favour of the Trident successor programme at today’s Scottish Trades Union Congress conference. SMB Scottish Secretary Gary Smith accused the Scottish Labour party of playing ‘fast and loose with thousands of livelihoods at Faslane, Coulport, Rosyth and across our wider defence-related industries’.
But what is odd is that the party is promising to set out details of how it will protect the jobs that would be lost if the successor programme was abandoned. Trident renewal is a reserved matter, as are all defence issues, and therefore Scottish Labour has absolutely no power over it. Perhaps a symbolic line in the party’s manifesto is important to those in the hierarchy, but it is another matter for Labour’s advisers to devote time to working out what they would do about defence jobs when, even if something truly extraordinary happened and they ended up in power in Holyrood, they will never have to use that work as a party. All of which means the party is provoking a fight within its own ranks and with its supporter trade unions without any discernible benefit.
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