Nato: wrong - Trident: gone!

NATO: wrong – Trident: gone!

As many of you will know the SNP recently changed long-standing policy and adopted a position of an independent Scotland being, or remaining if you wish to follow the EU analogy, a member of NATO.

I’m against nuclear weapons. No matter how you dress them up. I always have been and always will be. The sooner Trident, a weapons system of mass destruction and murder, is removed from our country the better. 

So that’s where I come from.

You can disagree if you like, arguing that “we” need them to deter some undefined threat from some undefined source, but I’m afraid as far as I’m concerned their use cannot be justified. They didn’t stop the airliners in 9/11 and there just isn’t any other credible threat elsewhere.

I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. Over a third of my adult life has been spent under its shadow. I actually remember, unless it’s some figment of my imagination, having drills in Primary School about what to do if the air raid sirens (which were only decommissioned in 1993) went off. We were told to crouch down under our desks in the same position you see in the airline safety brochures when you fly anywhere: precious good that would have done us with the Leuchars airbase a mere 7-8 miles across the Tay!

And make no mistake about it Dundee as Scotland’s 4^th city with its port facilities would have been on the list of targets for those incoming missiles of mass destruction and wanton slaughter.

Glasgow too, where I now live, as a major population centre and with at the time its extensive ship building industry would have been wiped from the map with as much ease as you might swat a fly. Easier in fact – unlike the fly, a city can’t get out of the way.

As a student I remember going to see a film in the students union – almost certainly The Day After, released to a TV audience of 100 million in the USA in 1983. It’s well worth a watch if you are in any doubt as to the outcome of a nuclear exchange. Scroll forward and watch from around the 50 minute mark if you just want to see those effects, but the film itself, although long, is very watchable.

So taking all that into account I don’t see the benefit of an independent Scotland being in an organisation which would still permit the FIRST use of nuclear weapons. Not retaliation: the FIRST use.

But isn't everyone else is in it you may ask? You’d be wrong to think so. Many European countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria are not. They participate in the Partnership for Peace Programme but are not NATO members.

I’ve always believed that independence for Scotland will give us a chance to be different. We already have  health and education systems diverging widely from the rest of the UK and there is no reason why we should go down the same road as other nations.

A couple of statistics I came across whilst researching this blog took my breath away.

The first is that the combined military spending of the NATO countries makes up 70% of the world’s defence spending. The second is that the percentage of GDP spent on defence by the UK is second only to the USA and at 2.6% is a full 0.5% (and that’s a lot of money) ahead of the country in 3^rd place.

Who are we trying to kid here? Why are we spending so much of our money in this manner?

A quick read of some of the comments on any SNP/Independence stories in the likes of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and even sadly the Guardian will soon reveal the answer.

Down south they still haven’t grasped the fact that 2/3 of the globe is no longer coloured pink and that there is no British Empire.

There is of course another way. The way an independent Scotland, no matter its political make up,  would undoubtedly follow. A small compact defence force, comparable with the likes of Norway and Denmark, nations of similar sizes, available to the UN for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

But to participate in NATO in its present form is simply morally wrong.

So for all those reasons I think the SNP got it wrong at their conference, perhaps making the decisions for what it thought were all the right reasons, but still wrong. In all my years of campaigning not ONCE has anyone on a doorstep asked me what our policy on NATO was.

For that matter the two MSPs who resigned from the party afterwards got it wrong too. They were elected on a party list not an individual platform. The policy of the party they represent has changed. Get over it, admit you made a mistake, ask to come back and let’s move forward together. There are mechanisms for changing party policy – it was done once and it can be changed again. But not this side of independence.

Moving to Trident and the nuclear submarine “fleet” (another post-Imperial hangover to call four submarines a fleet of course) with a projected cost of £20 BILLION – at 2006/7 prices. Faslane, their base, is of course another reason Glasgow would have been obliterated in a nuclear strike.

Post-independence these submarines would of course be inherited by “rumpUK “or whatever they wish to call themselves. I have no inherent problem with the remainder of the UK pursuing this make-believe Imperial identity, but if it comes complete with a Scottish dartboard, bullseye Faslane, well they can have that all to themselves. The Thames would seem a nice new home for them – it would certainly concentrate a few minds down south on the matter as the awful truth of the matter is that all three rumpUK political parties are in favour of spending that £20 billion.

How many hospitals and schools could that money build? How many much needed homes? How many jobs could an investment of that scale produce? Put it however you like it’s a scandalous amount of money.

Going back to the jobs and you often read, usually with Jackie Baillie’s name writ large in the article, much like the rest of her you might think, that thousands and thousands of jobs are at risk if Trident is either scrapped or moved south.

Not so – an article published in the press this week, incidentally hot on the tail of another one suggesting Scotland’s defence spending would be over £1 billion LESS than our share of the UKs total (largely but not entirely due to not squandering cash on Trident), gave the lie to that statistic. 520 jobs directly depend on the nuclear submarine fleet.

520 jobs is still 520 jobs. But £1 billion a year is a lot of money to play about with to create new ones!

Scotland has a chance to take its place in the world – let’s make it a place we would want our children and grandchildren to grow up in!