Vote strengthens Jeremy Corbyn in seeking nuclear debate, as delegates back scrapping of weapons project if there is investment in jobs for laid-off workers

The Scottish Labour party has voted overwhelmingly to abandon the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons, adding to pressure on the party’s Westminster leaders to review its pro-nuclear defence policy.

The vote, carried by 70% of Labour constituencies and trade union members, will strengthen Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to force the UK party into carrying out what he described last week as a “serious and positive” debate on ending Labour’s formal support for renewing Trident.

Describing nuclear weapons as “a mortal threat to humanity’s survival” and “massively expensive”, the Scottish Labour motion said renewing Trident would encourage nuclear proliferation. It said it was immoral to spend billions on the system at a time of worsening austerity in public spending.

It stressed that scrapping Trident’s replacement would be conditional on large sums being invested in creating new engineering and hi-tech jobs for the thousands of defence workers likely to lose their jobs in key Labour seats around the UK.

The motion, which closely mirrors Corbyn’s policy, will be seen by his supporters as a valuable endorsement of his unilateralist policy on disarmament. It stresses protecting defence jobs, underlining Labour’s nervousness about the industry’s powerful trade unions and votes in key constituencies.

A spokesman for Corbyn said: “The vote by the Scottish Labour Party Conference on Trident renewal and the protection of defence jobs is a clear sign that Labour’s democracy has opened up. Scottish Labour Party members have spoken. That will now feed into the wider UK Labour debate and review of defence policy.”

There was immediate criticism from Michael Fallon, the UK defence secretary, who said the Scottish Labour vote “underlines the danger that the Labour leadership poses to our national security”. He said renewing Trident was crucial to the UK’s security as well as protecting thousands of jobs. He urged anti-Corbyn MPs in Labour to rebel: “For 60 years, successive Labour and Conservative governments have been united on this issue. I appeal to moderate Labour MPs to back our decision to maintain a round-the-clock nuclear capability – the ultimate guarantee of Britain’s security.”



The motion was unequivocal in its opposition to nuclear weapons. The stance will infuriate supporters of Nato within the party but is likely to bolster its attempts to woo leftwing voters away from the Scottish National party.



Christopher Rimicans, a 16-year-old activist from the Cunninghame South constituency party, won the loudest applause of the debate when he stated: “It’s not socialism if you’re going to press that button to kill millions of people. It’s just morally wrong.”

Ian Murray, the shadow cabinet member and shadow Scottish secretary, said the new policy would feed into the UK party’s review of Trident, led by Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary. A longstanding unilateralist, Murray said he was delighted by the vote.

The Scottish party had “come to quite a conclusive decision”, he said. “I’m pleased. This is the position I have held all my political life.”

But Murray was unclear about whether this new policy would appear in Scottish Labour’s manifesto for the 2016 Holyrood elections. While it was now formal Scottish Labour policy, Trident renewal was a reserved, Westminster issue and a decision on what to put into the election manifesto had not yet been made.

The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, immediately welcomed the vote but said it was only symbolic while it remained UK party policy to retain Trident. She tweeted: “Good news that @scottishlabour has voted against Trident renewal ... but it will only make a difference if UK Lab MPs vote against it in HoC.”

The vote against Trident will, however, worry Labour party strategists. While opposing the Trident renewal will help Labour to deal with the substantial threat from the SNP on the left, many potential mainstream Labour voters support the nuclear deterrent and will be irritated if the party is diverted by a row over its future.

Popular support for Trident is lower in Scotland, but more Scottish voters believe it should stay in Scotland if it became independent. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that voters believe the future of Trident is of low-level concern compared with the economy, health and schools.

The debate at Scottish Labour’s annual conference in Perth opened up deep divisions among Scottish trade union leaders and senior Labour MSPs as they fought openly over the impact the policy would have on defence jobs at Faslane submarine base on the Clyde and Rosyth dockyard near Edinburgh.

Gary Smith, the acting Scottish regional secretary for the GMB union, which has several thousand members in defence jobs, accused conference delegates of being self-indulgent, since the Scottish party did not control defence policy – an area reserved to Westminster.

In blunt language, Smith said the party was guilty of “Alice in Wonderland politics and pie-in-the-sky jobs”. He said it was utterly disingenuous of the motion to claim that the highly-skilled, well-paid jobs which would be lost could be directly replaced by a defence diversification agency.

He told delegates that if he tried to make that case at Faslane, “I would leave that yard with a size-10 steel toecap placed in a certain orifice.”

Jackie Baillie, the MSP for Dumbarton, which includes the Faslane base,cited an email from the Unite leader, Len McCluskey, to a shop steward at Rosyth dockyard which derided the defence diversification agency policy – a central part of the Scottish Labour motion.

Defence diversification “has produced nothing and is unlikely to produce anything of substance in the future”, McCluskey’s email said.

Baillie said scrapping Trident’s replacement would raise profound questions about Faslane’s future as the UK’s only nuclear submarine base, threatening 13,000 jobs there and in the surrounding area. She said her party had to deal with “reality not rhetoric” and “jobs not gestures”.

Internal splits in Unite were then highlighted when Thomas Docherty, who lost his Commons seat in Fife covering the Rosyth area at May’s general election, said all the unions at Rosyth – including Unite’s members – were vehemently opposed to scrapping Trident’s replacement.

Docherty said there was a clear defence case for retaining Trident, as the world was a far more uncertain and volatile place. “The old orthodoxies of the last 70 years are gone,” he said. “We certainly can’t make assumptions about the threats we may face in 10, 20, 30, 50 or 60 years.”

The Scottish Labour motion had been publicly backed by Pat Rafferty, the Scottish regional organiser for Unite, which helped ensure a heavy vote in support from the trade union bloc in the party.

He said the motion’s arguments for proper job diversification were sound and the “best opportunity” for pursuing proper disarmament. “Multilateralism and non-renewal of Trident are not non-compatible positions,” he said.

John Spellar, a defence minister under Tony Blair and shadow foreign minister under Ed Miliband, described the Scottish party vote as “self-indulgent” but of no greater significance to the UK leadership as a vote by any of Labour’s 10 regional parties.



The north west regional Labour party, “which has a lot more Labour MPs than Scotland” and thousands of Trident submarine-building jobs at the Barrow on Furness shipyard, had its conference on Saturday but did not vote on the issue, Spellar said. Allowing different regions to set different policies on Westminster issues risked “Balkanising” Labour, he added.

A supporter of Trident’s renewal, Spellar said voters would see Scottish Labour’s motion as “heading back to the bad old days when different regions and indeed different Labour councils wanted to have their own foreign policy. The national party should have a national policy.”