Scottish Referendum (Trident)

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Davidson]

The key word is “realistically”. We have not had any estimates from the Scottish Government that we regard as solid; we have had to search around. On the point about the number of jobs directly involved with Trident, the UK Government have made it absolutely clear that, on the solid trade union principle of “one out, all out”, if the Trident missile-firing submarines were removed from Faslane, everything else would go—the Trafalgar submarines, the Astute submarines and the headquarters. Within the United Kingdom, the intention is not only for 50 years of secure employment, but for Faslane and Coulport to become a centre of excellence for submarines for the entire United Kingdom. The new Trafalgar boats would therefore be moved there as and when, as well as the training facilities scattered throughout a number of locations in the United Kingdom, so that everything connected with submarines would be on the west coast of Scotland. That is why the number of jobs involved would go up from 6,700 to 8,200 over a period. It is security and growth with the United Kingdom and the great unknown with separation.

To return to the question of removing the nuclear deterrent from Scotland, the statements made so far have the merit of clarity: the SNP wants to remove Trident. Alex Salmond, the First Minister, has said that he wants a written constitution that includes

“an explicit ban on nuclear weapons being based on Scottish territory”.

Interestingly, that does not include a ban on nuclear weapons visiting Scottish territory. The SNP might well intend Scotland to be similar to Norway and Denmark, which have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and therefore allow nuclear weapons in their waters and on their soil while pretending that they are not. No doubt we will get clarification on that in due course.

The key issue for us is, what are the parameters? Our role as a Committee is to provide information and evidence to the people of Scotland to inform their decisions. If the nuclear weapons are to be removed, we wished to establish the parameters within which that could be done. At one end of the range, according to the CND, it could be done quickly; at the other end, it would require 20 to 25 years to build alternative facilities. Somewhere within there, in the event of a separation decision, will come the solution. People in Scotland, in particular those employed at Faslane and Coulport, deserve to be told now which of those alternatives is favoured by the SNP; it is then the responsibility of the UK Government to respond. The Committee does not accept that it is reasonable for the UK Government not to say anything in such circumstances, but we understand that the first step has to be taken by the SNP, the forces of darkness in the Scottish Government.

The CND, from its evidence, clearly believes that the missiles can be disabled within days. Apparently, there is a fuse thing that can be pulled out, which effectively disables the missiles and means that they will not work any more. Those to whom I cannot refer will no doubt tell me that it is much more complicated than that, but that is the gist. There seemed to be general agreement that those fuses I pulled out could be put in the boot of my car—for the interest of the population, a Vauxhall Vectra, which is not a particularly specialist vehicle—and driven down to England, therefore being removed from Scotland. In such circumstances, the missiles would not work so, within eight days, the missiles could be disarmed, defused, defanged or whatever simile is wished. It would then take eight weeks for the warheads to be removed from the submarines—basically, a big hand comes down, grabs them up and puts them down. Again, the process is a bit more complicated, but that is the gist. Believe it or not, that takes people eight weeks. It is then anticipated that the removal of the nuclear weapons from Scotland would take two years—a figure based on the existing timetable for the replacement of the missiles, because they regularly get lifted out of the submarines in Coulport, with the warheads taken off to be polished or whatever, to be recycled and come back up.

The weapons, therefore, could realistically be removed from Scotland within two years. The subsequent disarming and so on would be a longer process, but that would take place in England; that would be the remaining United Kingdom’s position. No one has come forward to say that that timetable is not viable, feasible or safe. It comes down to a question of political will. The Scottish Government could not do that on their own, however, and they would require technical assistance from the Royal Navy and the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston and elsewhere, but if there was co-operation, it could be achieved. That is one parameter: the weapons could be removed within that time scale.

The other parameter, if the United Kingdom wishes to retain a nuclear, at-sea deterrent, relates to the need to construct alternative facilities elsewhere in the United Kingdom or to base the missiles abroad in some way. Some who came to see us suggested that the missiles, warheads or boats could be based in France or the United States. The responses we have had, however, indicate that that is not as realistic as was once anticipated, so we are setting that option aside. We therefore want to focus on the other parameter, which is the replacement of Faslane.

Nuclear weapons require three functions: support facilities, docking, including loading, and maintenance. A number of alternative locations have been looked at: Devonport, Barrow, Milford Haven and a number of others. Opinion varies about the amount of work necessary for a relocation. One argument is that the facilities could be split. Faslane and Coulport are clearly separate facilities, but they are obviously proximate. The question is whether to have a 20-mile gap and so on, or more. It has been generally accepted that that could be done, but planning requirements are much more stringent now and our evidence indicated that 20 to 25 years is the most realistic estimate of how long it would take the United Kingdom to build replacement facilities, and there is an issue of whether it would want to do that. The political and economic costs of relocating Trident would be huge, and some of the arguments suggest that part of those costs would be borne by a separate Scottish Government. The cost of relocation would be imposed on the United Kingdom by a separate Scottish Government, and the United Kingdom’s view is that it would be reasonable for the Scottish Government to pay at least part, if not all, of those costs.

I expect that that view would not be shared by the Scottish Government, but it would become part of the discussion and debate, and part of the argument. My understanding is that the view on both sides is that nothing is settled until everything is settled, so other lines of the separation budget could not be agreed without this issue also being agreed. Everything would have to be settled together.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

The Select Committee took evidence on relocation, and perhaps its Chair could enlighten me on exactly where and by whom that relocation would take place. The document, “Trident: Nowhere to Go”, analysed every option and historical document going back 30 years when planning was less stringent, and concluded that there was no alternative to Faslane anywhere in English waters. It would be useful to know why the Committee thought there was a possibility of relocation in England.

[Mr Davidson]

The Committee took the view that there was a possibility of relocation elsewhere in the United Kingdom, not just in England. Locations in Wales were also mentioned. Francis Tusa, editor of Defence Analysis, was perhaps most optimistic about how to do that. He pointed out helpfully that the loading facility at Coulport, which unloads nuclear weapons and so on, is a floating dock. By definition, it floats, so it could presumably be moved, and the facility would not require complete rebuilding in the way that those of us who had not realised that a floating dock floated had assumed. The matter might not be as difficult as it appears, but we are not experts, and it might turn out that that cannot be done, in which case the parameter would change, but it is clear that if it were relocated that would take 20 to 25 years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Weir]

Twenty-five of the 28 member states in NATO do not have nuclear weapons. The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) asked whether NATO would let Scotland in if we wanted rid of nuclear weapons; I remind her that Canada, a member of NATO, got rid of its nuclear weapons in 1984 and Greece, another member of NATO, got rid of them in 2001. It is not unprecedented. Norway does not have nuclear weapons, for example.

Much of the rest of the report goes into detail about the options open to the UK Government in finding an alternative to Faslane. Frankly, that does not appear to me to be the concern of the Scottish people or Government. It is a matter for the UK Government, should they wish to continue with the possession of nuclear weapons. Scottish independence gives the remainder of the UK the perfect opportunity to accept that it can no longer justify the possession of such weapons and to decide that it will no longer have them, but that is a decision for it to make. It is worth noting that even some military figures have begun to question the wisdom of retaining Trident in the UK, given the huge cuts to conventional forces.

[Michael Connarty]

The hon. Gentleman said earlier that he wished to see our shores rid of such weapons. As someone who has been a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament since the days of Polaris, and who remains a member of the parliamentary CND, I am concerned about the safety of all the nations in the United Kingdom. Is he saying that neither he nor the Scottish Government care if there is a similar danger elsewhere in the UK to the lives of the people in the UK?

[Mr Weir]

I have just said that, in my opinion, the UK should get rid of Trident. However, once we have our independence and the missiles are removed from Scotland, if the UK wants to retain them, that is a matter for the remainder of the UK. Scotland will not have them. We will have nothing to do with them.

Interestingly, as the report suggests, there seem to be alternatives. Francis Tusa of Defence Analysis has been quoted as saying that the problems have been exaggerated. It appears that the UK Government do not want to site the missiles on the south coast of England for fear that the missiles would be too near centres of population, but it does not seem to worry them that Faslane is close to the main centres of the population of Scotland.

It seems curious that there is objection to the use of Kings Bay in Georgia, because it might give the impression that Trident is not a totally independent system. I think most people think that already. Given that the report says that a stockpile of weapons is stored there and that the UK already contributes £12 million per annum towards the site, it seems that there is already considerable involvement there. Francis Tusa also makes the point that previously there were shared storage facilities with the Americans at Iserlohn in Germany, but such considerations are for the remaining parts of the UK, not the Scottish Government, who wish to see the missiles removed from Scotland.

Much of the debate has been about the impact on jobs if the Trident system left Faslane, but nowhere in the report is there a mention of the jobs implication; the report is about what the UK might do with Trident when Scotland is independent and ensures that we do not have weapons of mass destruction on our soil. However, the Scottish National party understands the concerns of those who work at the base.

Scottish Ministers have made it clear that they are fully committed to the future of Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde in an independent Scotland, operating as a conventional naval base without nuclear weapons. We are the only party in Scotland to have made that commitment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure, Mr Bone, to speak under your chairmanship, which I have done a number of times in other venues in meetings of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking.

I said earlier that I have been against nuclear weapons in the UK since Polaris was brought to the Clyde. It was the great contamination of our nation—I mean the United Kingdom rather than just Scotland. I was deeply distressed by the comments of the hon. Member for Angus (Mr Weir), who indicated that as long as the SNP could get it out of Scotland, Trident would then be someone else’s decision. I would still be campaigning against it wherever it was to be relocated, and I would argue strongly against it being relocated anywhere within the UK.

Quite simply, I support the “Terminating Trident”—or banning the bomb, as we used to call it—part of the subject matter of this debate. Most of the wonderful songs written about that came from the Labour movement, not the Scottish National party, which was a minuscule organisation in Scotland at the time, because it was focused, as always, on breaking up the United Kingdom and separating Scotland from the UK. It was never part of the movement that was clearly committed to organising against the bomb. I went on the marches and I visited the peace camps. I did not see any Scottish National party members there; I saw members of the Labour movement in Scotland arguing for a better future with no nuclear weapons anywhere in the UK.

We are debating not just what happens to those pieces of metal, and the international motions and structures we sign up to that enable us to use such weapons, whether under someone else’s banner or not, but what happens to the people. “Ban the bomb but don’t dump the people”—that was always the statement made at demonstrations outside the gates of Faslane and Coulport. It was never about getting rid of the people who were inside doing the job that the nation had asked them to do, using the skills that they had been trained in and were proud to serve their country with. Unfortunately, that is the unanswered question, which was asked by the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee.

If we are to have such a monumental change in the structure of the defence budget, after what would be the much greater, more cataclysmic decision to separate Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom—Scotland would be leaving 92% of the UK behind and becoming some wee country that would not be a significant player in the world—we must think about how we can deal with that. That is the problem for the SNP Government, who, by the way, as I keep having to repeat, were elected by 24% of the people of Scotland. The structure of the electoral system set up by those under Donald Dewar, who thought that by helping their Liberal comrades they would enable Labour to form an alliance with the Liberals in Scotland, actually advantaged the Scottish National party and gave it a majority. The Labour party, because it had done such an abysmal job in Scotland and lost the faith of the Scottish people, got about half the SNP’s percentage at the election. None the less, a party cannot have a landslide victory when only 24% of the people vote for it. It is a fix that happens because of electoral arithmetic, and it has nothing to do with popular support. If there were some sea change among the people in Scotland, we would have to consider what to do with the bomb.

The Chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee said that he has been assured that the fuses could be removed from missiles within eight days. I have recently read a great deal about the nuclear weapons stores of the world, particularly in the US, and learned about the process by which chemicals in the fuse heat up and then trigger the missiles. The people in the States who researched and created those chemical fuses are now all dead. The fuses deteriorate and do not necessarily react 30 or 40 years after they were made. Believe it or not, the US has not yet found a way of synthesising the products that would allow the replacement of those fuses, so we could have a redundant nuclear network throughout the world, including in the UK, within the next decade. Therefore, defusing the missiles might not take eight days; it could be very much quicker than that.

[Mr Davidson]

Is my hon. Friend saying that the professional advice that I received that it would be safe for me to have the fuses in the back of my Vauxhall Vectra was incorrect?

[Michael Connarty]

I advise my hon. Friend not to put the chemicals that are contained in the nuclear fuses in the back of his Vectra. In fact, I would not put them in the back of anything that was not a nuclear bomb store. The fuses might not set off a nuclear weapon, but they might blow his Vectra back to the future.

Eight months for removing the warheads is correct. They are kept separate and can be detached and taken somewhere else. As for it taking up to 25 years to relocate the facilities, all the analyses now available publicly in the “Nowhere to Go” document by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament show that there is nowhere for the weapons to be relocated. There was nowhere all those years ago that was thought to be isolated and secure enough to install the nuclear weapons. Now, given the population changes in the conurbations around those areas, it is unlikely that anywhere would allow those weapons to be installed. The question of relocating them, therefore, could not be resolved unless there was some sort of dictatorship of Government on the people in the UK. Certainly, the idea of putting them in Wales or Northern Ireland would cause a massive uprising.

Should we even be thinking about moving the weapons somewhere else? It is a fantasy to think that in the event of a nuclear conflagration, Scotland would be safer having them somewhere else that was not Faslane or Coulport. Do we really think that an enemy of the UK would not want to bomb the establishments based in my constituency in Grangemouth, where the North sea oil and gas comes in, just because we put the weapons somewhere else? What are we going to do? Are we going to paint CND signs on the tops of all the buildings in Scotland? Let me own up to something. When I was leader of a council, we actually did put CND signs on our vans. Somebody pointed out that we should have put them on the roof because they could not be seen on the side of the vans, but we were young and foolish then. I have learned now that it is a nonsense to say that we are not part of the UK because we do not have the bomb any more and that if there were a conflagration we would be safe. I thought that the SNP Government and Alex Salmond, who is just about my age, had also grown up.

[Pete Wishart]

Of course it is right to say that if there were a nuclear strike, it is unlikely that Scotland would be spared the consequences, but should one not reflect the values of one’s community or one’s nation and say, “We refuse to hold these weapons. We refuse to threaten other peoples with these weapons.” Should we not be doing what we can to reflect the views of the Scottish people in this matter?

[Michael Connarty]

The hon. Gentleman is actually a little bit late. Having campaigned with the Labour movement over many years, my understanding is that more than 70% of the people of Scotland are already against these weapons. Therefore, changing the mood of the people in Scotland by removing the weapons is not the point. I want to see the mood changed throughout the United Kingdom so that we can persuade a Government in the future—a Labour Government, I hope—that we should be moving in the direction of taking the weapons out of the whole land mass of the UK; that is my aim. If my SNP colleagues, who support the idea of ridding the world of these nuclear weapons, want to go off and hide in a corner then they can do so, but they should not pretend that it is sensible Government policy. I am working up to my next point, “Don’t dump the people.”

[Mrs Laing]

Although I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman, I fully appreciate that the position that he takes and has always taken is a position of principle. However, is it not rather hypocritical on the part of the Scottish National party to say, “We don’t want nuclear weapons here, but we will depend on the rest of this island of Great Britain to have nuclear weapons and to have a credible defence policy that will continue to protect Scotland”? However much the SNP pretends that Scotland can be separate, we are all on this small island together.

[Mr Andrew Rosindell in the Chair]

[Michael Connarty]

I would not necessarily drift into unparliamentary language, such as “hypocrisy”; I think that is ill-judged and unfortunately a negative force in politics. I worry about the principles of the SNP. The issue is not independence, but the tenets on which the SNP bases its independence argument, of being separate and somehow thinking that it can be detached from other people’s concerns.

I am a socialist; I still want to see a world socialist organisation that tears down capitalism. If we have not learned the lesson from what the gamblers in the banks did—it was not gamblers in the Government, but gamblers in the banks—to our nations, not just here but throughout the world, then we have learned nothing. Of course, this Government have learned nothing from all that, as we can see from the policies that they are involved in at the moment.

The figure given by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Mr Davidson), the Chairman of the Scottish Affairs Committee, was that 6,700 jobs—possibly up to 8,200 jobs—rely on Trident at the moment. There is also the question about all the other jobs that are attached to it, such as shipbuilding and the industries and supply sources that feed into it. I do not want to see those people made redundant; I want to see these people being reskilled, redeployed and creating useful things for our nation.

That is the one thing missing from the SNP’s arguments—the SNP has not done that work. It has not worked out how to deal with this question. The idea is that we just empty the warheads out of Trident and put all the soldiers in who are going to come back and volunteer, before they are quickly made redundant because £2.5 billion of budget will not keep many soldiers in a job and Scotland certainly will not have a navy, or many helicopters or planes to fly. It is a joke, it is unfair and it is an insult to the Scottish people to say, by assertion, “We can do this and it will all work.”

Instead we can look at the people who have been arguing closely alongside me—or me alongside them, I should say, because I respect them and their contribution is much greater than mine. For example, there are the people from the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre, including Dr Nick Ritchie, who has been doing tremendous work. The centre produced a report on Trident in 2008, “Trident: What is it For?”, which argues and shows that Trident is not for anything in the modern world, quite frankly; Trident is a nonsense. The centre talks sensibly, as the SNP should be doing to challenge the assertions that are made and the questions that are asked by the Scottish Affairs Committee. The centre produced another report in 2009, “Stepping down the Nuclear Ladder: Options for Trident on a Path to Zero”, which worked out how we can go—step by step—away from these weapons and what we can do with them. In 2010, the centre produced the report, “Continuity/Change: Rethinking Options for Trident Replacement”. These reports are fundamental sources of information about how we can move away from a world, and a UK, that has nuclear weapons in its armoury, and use the money for something much more useful.

However, what do we have from the Government? What we have from the Government is the fact that they are going to step up the main-gate costs in 2016. Those costs are going to be enormous and we will be landed with another generation of weapons, like for like, that is not justifiable, that was never justifiable according to the 2008 report I referred to, that is not sustainable and that should not be moved along with.

As we know, a commission is sitting and considering the question of the future of Trident. I had the pleasure of going along to one of the discussions around the review, “Trident Alternatives Review and the Future of Barrow”. Why do I mention Barrow? It is because that review is the kind of work that the SNP Government should have been doing if they really meant to remove Trident and if they were not just about government by assertion or politics by gesture. That is the kind of work that should have been done, but I see none of that work being done by the SNP. That review argued very strongly that if we want to have a situation where Barrow, which builds these submarines, will be without that work, we must invest £100 million per year in that community to reskill people and look to the future. If that process continued, there would then be a new set of people with a new set of skills, who would build an economy in that area.

The SNP has done none of that work. What are we going to have? Heathers and bagpipes up the Kyle of Lochalsh? Is that what the future is going to be about? Is it going to be about emptying out the area and letting the people drift away, and hoping that the people who remain there will somehow attract tourists who will give them handouts? The work has not been done.

I will tell you an interesting fact, Mr Rosindell, as you have taken the Chair. When I looked into my wife’s ancestors, I discovered that her third great-grandfather was the ferry manager from Ardentinny to Faslane. In his day, there was an agricultural community on both sides of the water, and that route became a route for people to go down into the central belt of Scotland; sadly, that emptied out most of that area. The idea that we could not have people living there with high skills, in a very attractive area, who could work in the conurbations of Scotland and commute, or in fact who could create whole new industries in that area, is a nonsense.

Let us consider a parallel. When I first came into the House, I went down to visit Baglan Bay. Baglan Bay was a BP refinery and chemical site, because we thought that the oil would come from the other side of the world and to the west coast of the nation. BP realised that would not make sense, because of North sea oil, so it shut down Baglan Bay, slowly but surely. However, there are more jobs in that area today than there were when BP had its refinery and when there was a chemical industry there, because the Wales Office, which was then responsible, planned for the change, trained people for it and put the infrastructure in for it. None of that type of work has been done by the SNP Government, because they live by assertion; they do not live by standard logic and proof.

[Pete Wishart]

I have listened very carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s remarks. Like me, he is passionately against nuclear weapons; he believes that we need to rid the world of this scourge—this immoral curse that we have on our land. We say that we will get rid of them after we secure independence. He wants rid of them too, so what is his plan for jobs once he secures his ambition to ensure that Trident is cleared from Faslane? What would he do for jobs?

[Michael Connarty]

I am very happy to answer that question, because I have just given the example of the work that has been done on Barrow. People who are looking at the future of the UK without nuclear weapons are looking at what it takes. It is not a matter of location; it is a matter of industrial, manufacturing and education policy. Whether or not we had stopped making gas lanterns in Faslane and we were going to make some new things for the nation, we would have to plan and train, put people in the skill set, and give them the infrastructure. Whether something is made redundant by technology or by the movement of history, such as the movement of agricultural workers to the conurbations, it is a cycle. A nation must plan ahead for the people and for its needs in the future.

That is what is missing. A very legitimate question was asked by the Scottish Affairs Committee, “What do you do in this situation?” The Committee is asking the SNP Government to answer that question, and it is getting nothing; it is getting silence. I do not think that this argument about Trident adds to the arguments for independence, but it would be nice to think that the Government of Scotland at this moment were planning to do something and would put forward a plan that the people could look at, but they are not doing that. Instead, they are saying, “Jump off the cliff. It’s all right, you’ll find the water’s warm when you land.”

[Katy Clark]

My hon. Friend has already made reference to his time as a leader of a Scottish local authority. Of course, at that time he was exceptionally well known for his radical credentials. And at that time, the Labour party’s position was that we wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons in this country, and a huge amount of work was done by Labour and the trade unions on defence diversification. Is he aware whether the Scottish Government have devoted any office or time to defence diversification, and does he think that that is exactly the kind of information that should be coming to the fore at this time?

[Andrew Rosindell (in the Chair)]

Before the hon. Gentleman replies to that question, I remind him that there are others who want to get into this debate and he has already been speaking for 18 minutes. Thank you.

[Michael Connarty]

I am very grateful to you, Mr Rosindell, for saying that, after all this time that I have been campaigning, I am not allowed much more than 18 minutes. If anything I have said is redundant, I strike it from the record, but what I would say is that the questions asked in the context of the Scottish Affairs Committee remain unanswered. The questions that I asked, which are slightly different from those of the Scottish Affairs Committee, remain unanswered in most of the context of the UK, but we have some indication that the nuclear industry commission, which has Lord Browne of Ladyton and others on it, is beginning to look very seriously at that issue. The point that the commission makes, and I make, is whether or not we have a scenario with a final conclusion, which might come from independence or the removal of Trident because of some other reason, we must plan, argue and invest for the future. None of that is in the SNP documents that I have found; in fact, the question of weapons diversification is not on the agenda at all. It is all about government by suggestion. In that context, I have to conclude that if the argument is that we would feel morally better if we got rid of Trident, we should do so on a UK basis. None of the arguments I have heard show that the SNP has any idea what it would do if it had independence and was facing the removal of Trident from Faslane and Scotland.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—