The Scottish Labour party is to vote on abolishing Britain’s nuclear deterrent after delegates voted heavily in favour of a debate on the Trident missile system.
The decision to debate cancelling Trident’s replacement at Scottish Labour’s annual conference this weekend came as activists applauded calls from Jeremy Corbyn for the party to embrace “the sunshine of socialism”.
On Friday, delegates overwhelmingly backed calls from constituency parties to hold a potentially divisive vote on Trident’s renewal on Sunday: the party’s leadership is split on the issue, with unions and MSPs at loggerheads.
In his first speech to Scottish Labour as leader of the UK party, Corbyn attacked the Scottish National party’s track record in government in the runup to next May’s Holyrood elections, insisting only Labour had a vision for a more equal Scotland.
He said true equality of opportunity had been stifled under the SNP, with nearly a million Scots in fuel poverty, cuts in college places, and people born in the poorest wards likely to die decades earlier than those born in the richest – a fact he called “a national scandal”.
But in a reference to Labour’s dire popularity ratings in Scotland, with polls giving it just 22% of the vote against more than 50% for the SNP, Corbyn admitted the party faced a challenge in overcoming the widely-held view that Labour was “too distant, too remote”.
He urged delegates to capture the energy of Scotland’s independence referendum last September, when 85% of voters in Scotland took part, by finding thousands of people who had never voted before.
Repeatedly using the word socialism, he said Scots “knew that regardless of how people voted it would have a dramatic effect on the future of your nation. I believe that all politics today – not just constitutional politics – is that important.”
Labour’s debate on renewing Trident is likely to mirror a hugely divisive debate at the SNP’s conference in 2012 on reversing its longstanding opposition to Nato membership, while still opposing nuclear weapons.
Driven by Alex Salmond’s desire to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scottish public opinion before last year’s independence referendum, party leaders only narrowly won the vote to endorse Nato membership. Three MSPs subsequently resigned from the SNP in protest.
The Scottish Labour debate on Trident will present party leaders with a significant political challenge whichever way it goes, so they are putting heavy emphasis on the merits of the party reaching an open, democratic decision.
Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader who favours retaining Trident until there is worldwide nuclear disarmament, told BBC Scotland on Friday she was “very open-minded” about the debate on Sunday and insisted the political risks to Labour were overstated.
“Everybody in the Labour party is against nuclear weapons,” she said. The party wanted to see nuclear weapons scrapped worldwide, “the question is the best way to do that”.
A vote to retain nuclear weapons would mirror mainstream public opinion in Scotland, which is narrowly in favour of the deterrent, but would allow the SNP to attack Labour from the left for failing to oppose Trident’s renewal.
While delegates to Labour’s UK conference saw Trident as a less important issue, and failed to debate it, scrapping Trident has risen much further up the political agenda on the Scottish left.
Voting to scrap Trident would appeal to many Scottish leftwing voters, helping Labour take on the SNP in the Holyrood elections, but would open up a deep and dangerous rift with the party in the rest of the UK and senior figures in Labour’s shadow cabinet. It would also alienate centre-ground voters Labour still needs to attract in Scotland.
Party activists and trade union delegates at the party’s Scottish annual conference in Perth made Trident a priority issue for a policy vote on Sunday, alongside the trade union bill, housing and the TTIP trans-Atlantic trade deal.
The wording of the Trident motion will not be finalised until Saturday and it remains unclear whether delegates to the Perth conference will vote to abolish it, but party leaders are bracing themselves for a heavy vote against Trident’s renewal.
Senior shadow cabinet members have openly resisted and criticised attempts by Corbyn to review that stance. He told the Guardian on Thursday he believed an anti-Trident vote by Scottish Labour could empower the unilateralist cause within the UK party.
“I think it might be an encouragement to many people in the rest of the UK to listen very carefully to what’s being said at the Scottish conference. There are similar debates going on all across the party in Britain,” he said.
Dugdale said she agreed with Corbyn that the only meaningful alternative policy was to invest all the money saved by scrapping Trident renewal on creating high technology jobs in the communities affected by the loss of the multi-billion pound contract.
She accused the SNP of fooling voters into believing the savings would see massive additional spending on public services.
“It can’t be spent 12 ways, like the SNP argue,” she said. “It has to go back into the communities with further investment.
“That’s Jeremy’s position and I actually think that’s the most honest position of any of the advocates of the case against nuclear systems.”
