George Osborne didn’t give up much by way of his weekend by spending a grey and wet bank holiday Monday visiting Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine base at Faslane – where it wasn’t a bank holiday anyway. But did his blatantly tactical manoeuvre on a serious and divisive issue cost him in terms of reputation?

I can see why ministers from David Cameron down can’t wait to get a crack at Jeremy Corbyn’s imminent leadership of the opposition. Andrew Sparrow sets out their thinking admirably in Tuesday’s Guardian, though our Tory pundit Matthew d’Ancona has been among those warning No 10 that an enfeebled Labour party will unleash the demons of rightwing Euroscepticism to torment them instead.

But that’s only half the folly, probably the lesser half. When the chancellor, who can’t help looking and sounding as cocky as a teenager in his first long trousers, pays a rare visit to Scotland, his priority ought to be to impress Scottish voters with his grave and thoughtful behaviour, not to flick the scab off a local grievance.

That’s what Osborne has done in promising an extra £500m to upgrade the base on the shores of Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute. Yes, I realise it will safeguard up to 6,700 Scottish jobs and possibly create more, and secure Britain’s future as a nuclear power, but that perspective is deeply divisive in Scotland, where assorted SNP, Labour, Green and other parties are actively hostile to everything Trident represents.

In the 25 years since the cold war ended, deterrence theory and practice has been neglected, so chances are that few of them remotely understand it. That probably goes for Nicola Sturgeon’s deputy, John Swinney, who sounded off indignantly on Monday.

George Osborne visits Faslane submarine base. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

Even Swinney, however, makes a valid point occasionally. He was right to protest that the Westminster parliament has not yet voted to renew the ageing Trident system and will not do so until March, when a Corbyn-led Labour party is likely to split on the issue.

He may be wearily predictable in calling Trident the “wrong moral choice” when there are many other claims on Britain’s stretched budgets, but plenty of serious military analysts share doubts about the wisdom of spending billions on a dangerous heritage weapon that will - with luck - never be used and may destabilise relations with our potential foes.

The money could better be spent strengthening hard-pressed conventional forces, they say, ones that may need to be deployed in a foreign trouble-spot despite Swinney and Corbyn’s opposition to wherever the trouble spot may be.

Osborne and Cameron, who are masters of tact compared with their chip–on-his-shoulder defence secretary, Michael Fallon, are not required to consult the Scottish government on defence expenditure or deployments. Defence was correctly made the reserve of the UK government under Labour’s 1998 devolution blueprint.

These matters are too important not to require a degree of consensus, let alone to be used as political footballs in such a crude and partisan way. On last year’s independence referendum, which they briefly looked like losing - itself an amazing show of ineptitude - as on Europe, the Cameron-Osborne axis looks tactically cute, but strategically foolish.

The SNP, in contrast, is all strategy. It’s all about independence, and the rest can wait until that state of nirvana has been achieved. Tuesday’s FT carries a savage editorial (paywall) about the Salmond-Sturgeon government’s “incompetent” record on public service since 2007. Who’s listening?

The indictment, widely shared but under-reported, includes cuts in health and education and a tendency to centralise. Scottish Tories protest that ministers overturn local planning decisions on more than half the appeals lodged, 77 out of 145. Democratic centralism indeed.

Osborne also went to Aberdeen to celebrate a £3bn Danish investment in the Culzean gas field, the biggest new North Sea field for a decade. He used the jaunt to celebrate the strengths of the UK, and his new oil field tax breaks. With oil trading at less than $50 per barrel and the North Sea in decline, that’s good news for all of us and especially for Aberdeen, which is finally feeling the pinch.

The handling of good news can be tacky stuff, and Sturgeon does it too. As a means of distracting from her visitor’s headlines she went to Port Glasgow on Monday to fast-forward a promising shipyard order, as you can read here in the Glasgow Herald. They shouldn’t, but they do.

The nuclear defence issue is larger than that in every sense. It’s worth the gravity of measured words on a bigger occasion than a wet bank holiday, not a one-line memo from the Tories’ Australian PR guru, Lynton Crosby.

As such it is one of many urgent challenges to Corbyn’s Labour – read Patrick Wintour’s terrific analysis here - that the Tories are lining up to exploit. Read Owen Jones’s grave pro-Corbyn assessment here for a positive, if daunting, perspective.

Here’s a flick of deterrence theory for younger readers who were not weaned on throw-weights, ICBMs and MIRVs. It’s not an easy topic for glib conclusions either way, but political debate is also about framing the arguments. My attention was drawn to this scholarly explanation of how well conservatives frame debates in the US. In fairness, I should add that the SNP has been pretty nimble on that score too in recent years, better than the big Westminster parties.



Examples of framing? Pollsters in Scotland get different answers on nuclear weapons, depending how they pose the question.

So, for the anti-Trident campaigners, how about: “Why should Britain spend billions on an independent nuclear deterrent it can’t afford or use, which is neither independent nor much of a deterrent?”

For the pro-nuclear camp: “Do you really want the nuclear defence of Europe against Russian expansionism in the looming post-Nato world to be left in the hands of France?”

Over to you. We’ll all have to think about it soon.

