I GREW up with a strong sense of right and wrong, drummed into me by the adults around me. Hitting people was wrong; killing was unconscionable.

So when I heard, as a child, about the USA’s incineration of 129,000 people at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, every inch of my being screamed out with indignation.

It’s easy to become jaded by the horror of global violence and the daily images of mass destruction on our TV screens over the past 20 years, from Serbia to Syria, from Palestine to Afghanistan, from Chechnya to Iraq. But there remains something indescribably chilling about nuclear weapons and their potential for instant annihilation of entire cities.

So, even as a fierce critic of Scottish Labour, I was delighted that the party voted against the renewal of Trident.

I wanted to watch the debate. Unfortunately, the BBC switched off their live streaming of the conference before it got under way yesterday, so I had to rely on live tweeting.

Stephen Low – a former BBC producer, as it happens – led the charge to overturn Scottish Labour’s now long-standing support for nuclear weapons. His most striking line was: “Fundamentally this is a life or death decision. We can choose to squander our resources, talents and the chance to build a different and better future by choosing an ever-greater capacity to dispense death.”

Tellingly, no-one seemed to present the military case for retaining nuclear weapons on the Clyde. In a rather silly outburst, Jackie Baillie accused the SNP of "nimbyism on a national scale" for wanting to move nuclear weapons to England. No SNP politician, or any anti-nuclear campaigner, for that matter, has ever argued that position.

The only people who want nuclear weapons on British soil are people like Jackie Baillie and her allies – the No Thanks brigade who say Yes Please to weapons of mass murder.

Her only other point, apparently, was to warn of massive job losses if Trident was not renewed. So let’s look at the economics of the most expensive job-creation scheme in human history.

A decade ago Gordon Brown announced his backing for replacing Trident. The move, reported The Guardian on June 22, 2006, “could cost the taxpayer between £13 billion and £25bn.” Later that year, Tony Blair’s Cabinet formally supported the renewal of Trident, insisting that the cost would be no more than £20bn.

Since then we’ve had the crash and the dawning of the Age of Austerity. But as housing, social security and local services were slashed to ribbons, Labour and Tory politicians wrote out blank cheques for Trident. The last time I looked, the cost had risen to £167 billion.

It turns out Gordon Brown and Tony Blair got their sums wrong. Not just by a few billion either. But by almost £150 billion. Their figures were out by a mind-boggling 800 per cent.

Jackie Baillie claims that 12,000 jobs in the west of Scotland depend on Trident. That figure is disputed by, well, the Ministry of Defence. In response to a Freedom of Information request a couple of years ago, the MoD said: “There are 520 civilian jobs at Her majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, including Coulport and Faslane, that directly rely upon the Trident programme”.

But let’s suppose the MoD is wrong and Jackie Baillie is right. By my calculations, the Trident renewal programme will cost almost £14 million per job. And if we believe the MoD that there are just 500 jobs, that works out at £327 million a job.

A few years back, the Tory-LibDem coalition dumped Labour’s "Flexible New Deal" because, in the words of David Cameron, “it cost a staggering £31,284 per job.” Compared to the Trident renewal job-creation programme, that sounds like a bit of a bargain.

The moral case against Trident is overwhelming. But just imagine what we could do with that kind of money. We could massively expand our rail networks, slash public transport fares, develop new low-carbon energy technologies, and build millions of new social housing units – all of which would create umpteen times more jobs than Trident. For goodness sake, you could use the money to pay 12,000 people £14 million each to do nothing! And we’d be rid of a mass murder machine to boot.

In the meantime, yesterday’s vote has vast ramifications for the Labour Party in Scotland and across the UK. The party’s UK leader has won the backing of the Scottish membership. But the Scottish leader has lost the backing of her Scottish membership. And the UK leader is out of step with his party membership in the rest of UK.

Labour’s Scottish activists now have a lot of serious thinking to do. Few people right now would put a fiver on Jeremy Corbyn ever becoming Prime Minister. Even fewer imagine he will ever be able to deliver nuclear disarmament.

So will the passionate speakers of yesterday, united in their indignation, simply stand by when Labour MPs are complicit in ensuring murderous weapons survive and thrive?

Or will they finally reach the inescapable conclusion that the only way to rid Scotland of nuclear weapons is to become independent?

Sturgeon welcomes Labour vote over Trident

Jackie Baillie embroiled in row after using Unite emails to argue for Trident renewal

The National View: Labour in a muddle after members say no to Trident renewal

