Why SNP national council must pass this motion on nuclear weapons

The National

17-05-2025

The four Vanguard submarines carry the Trident nuclear missiles Britain rents at the pleasure of President Trump. It's been an axiom of Scottish politics that although the SNP's anti-nuclear policy is not in the SNP constitution, it's in the party's DNA.
In recent weeks, though, there's been a rash of reports that some people who were once important in the SNP want to back a British bomb. The timing of this has an air of panic.
Those who wish to hold fast to the crumbling totem of a British bomb are normally motivated not by real security threats or concerns but by a delusional iteration of British greatness. Bear in mind this off-stage pining for retention of the British bomb (they dare not reveal themselves) is taking place at precisely the same time as a central tenet of UK nuclear strategy is disintegrating before our eyes.
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That tenet is Continuous At Sea Deterrence. CASD requires one Trident-carrying nuclear submarine to be at sea at any time, with the other three in various stages of readiness and refit.
The problem is that the four Vanguards are falling apart and their replacements, the new Dreadnought class, are years and billions of pounds away from entering service.
It is a good bet that, even if Broken Britain throws gargantuan sums of money at the problems of the knackered Vanguards, soon there will be times when no boat will be on station somewhere in the Atlantic.
It is not an overstatement to say CASD is literally sinking. Even now, rumours are rumbling among proud Britons who support the bomb that there have been times recently when there has been no Vanguard on patrol.
Funk – the condition, not the music – is increasingly evident in the ranks of Britain's mushy political centre's mainstream media acolytes.
Even they are increasingly clutching their political pearls in horror as Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, cranks up his tone-deaf automatons, such as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, to wreak more havoc on Labour's popularity. Quite why 'some who were once something' in the SNP want to run a tartan version of McSweeney's four-dimensional chess is puzzling.
Hegemonic political power achieved by a party at the ballot box does grant the leader political leeway beyond what is technically democratic, that just a fact of life.
However, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are now, and I say this with no political animus, historical figures. Even they ensured there would be no messing with the anti-nuclear DNA strand of the SNP.
The UK has moved from gradual to steep decline. The politics of the steep decline of Broken Britain is rather different, rather rawer, as the spectacular electoral performance of Reform UK illustrates.
READ MORE: UK wants to build new nuclear plants in Scotland, Ed Miliband says
To be fair, the Scottish Government has used some, though by no means all, its powers to mitigate that downward slip as evidenced again and again in Professor Danny Dorling's Shattered Nation. However, democracy is a cruel taskmaster and trust in politicians of all parties is at a historic low.
Recently, I attended an Electoral Reform Society event in Edinburgh where the results of recent Scottish polling on political trust were presented. Supermarkets were rated as two to three times more trustworthy than Scotland's politicians.
My party, indeed, all parties that profess probity, operating in a political and economic landscape of Broken Britain with trust in politicians at a very low ebb, need to conduct themselves in a way where the voices of the ordinary party members are respected.
That is why the following motion was tabled by the SNP Trade Union Group and Maryhill Branch of the SNP for debate at the SNP National Council on June 21.
It is designed to remind doubters, and the wider public, that ditching the party's anti-nuclear policy on removal of the British bomb from Scotland is a distraction and a further generator of public distrust.
SCOTLAND'S SECURITY
In view of destabilising events in Europe and beyond, this Council reaffirms that SNP policy is:
- To ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons when Scotland is able to do so as an independent nation.
- To support action to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland. These weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction do not protect us, but rather make us a target.
- To expose the truth about the supposed 'British' Trident nuclear weapons system. It is completely dependent on the US, which can control the system and cancel the lease of the missiles when the US president chooses.
- To develop security policies for Scotland which are relevant to our needs.