The Scottish parliament has voted strongly against the renewal of Trident after a rare display of unity by Labour and the Scottish National party.

In an unusual concession after years of rivalry on defence policy, the SNP adopted a motion put forward by Labour that said scrapping Trident’s replacement system had to be tied to a fully-funded programme to find new jobs for redundant defence workers.

The deal saw Scottish Labour’s leader, Kezia Dugdale, vote in favour of the motion, abandoning her long-standing opposition to unilateral disarmament, after her party voted by more than 70% to oppose nuclear weapons at its annual conference on Sunday.

With the amended motion calling for a defence diversification agency, the final tally was 96 in favour and 17 against, including the sole Labour rebel, Jackie Baillie, whose Dumbarton constituency includes the Trident submarine base at Faslane, and all the Tory and Liberal Democrat MSPs present.



The Holyrood vote will allow the policy’s supporters within Labour to argue that scrapping Trident represents majority opinion in Scotland but the conflict within Labour over the marked shift in policy continued on Tuesday.

Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, said it could never win a UK election with unilateral disarmament in its manifesto.

Lord Kinnock said Sunday’s conference vote would intensify the debate over Labour’s stance on Trident at Westminster, where senior shadow cabinet ministers are in open revolt over attempts by Jeremy Corbyn to oppose its renewal. The SNP is also likely to taunt Labour at Westminster over its deep divisions.

“The debate is wide open. What I do know is the British people will not vote for unilateral disarmament. And that reality has to be dealt with,” Kinnock said.



Trade union leaders at Faslane submarine base at the Clyde were also dismayed by Sunday’s vote, after Unite Scotland, which has 800 members at the base and the nearby nuclear warhead depot at Coulport, backed the motion against Trident’s replacement.

Derek Torrie, Unite’s shop steward at the Clyde naval base, said they were “dismayed and angry” at the union’s stance. “We expect the union to back us to the hilt in preserving and sustaining our jobs. We don’t believe it has done so,” Torrie told BBC Reporting Scotland on Monday.

Labour strategists hope the Holyrood vote will strengthen their appeal to leftwing voters at next May’s Scottish parliament elections, and among active churchgoers.

The Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament hailed the vote as a major boost to the disarmament cause, and the Church of Scotland issued a statement welcoming Holyrood’s opposition to the “morally and ethically abhorrent” weapon.

The future replacement of Trident rose quickly up the political agenda in Scotland after it became a totemic issue in the pro-independence campaign last year, and Labour is currently 30 points behind the SNP in Scottish opinion polls.

But Tory officials believe it will damage Labour’s standing among the mainstream voters it needs to win back key seats, including the East Renfrewshire constituency held for 18 years until the general election by Labour’s staunchly pro-Trident MP Jim Murphy.

The SNP’s decision to accept Labour’s motion also signals a shift in its stance. Before his resignation as party leader and first minister, Alex Salmond had focused the debate on scrapping Trident on the savings for public services, rather than reemploying the thousands of people whose jobs would be lost.

Baillie, the only Labour rebel to vote against Tuesday’s motion, insisted that abandoning Trident’s replacement would put Faslane’s future as the UK’s sole submarine base at risk and with it 13,500 highly-skilled jobs.

Keith Brown, the Scottish government infrastructure secretary, told Holyrood that although Trident was a reserved matter under Westminster’s control, its impact on the Scottish economy and its likely lifetime cost to the public sector – put by the Tory MP Crispin Blunt at £167bn – meant it was of keen interest to Scottish voters.

Brown, a veteran of the Falklands war, said Scotland’s share of that would be around £14bn. “It is wrong for the UK government to be contemplating building a new nuclear weapons launch system while at the same time introducing massive cuts to welfare,” Brown said.

“Around £1bn of the £12bn welfare cut by the UK government impacts directly on Scotland and it does seem to me to put the priorities of the UK government into quite sharp focus.”