Councillor Robb takes Trident to skewer Alan Reid

Alan Reid, Argyll’s MP, lives for part of his time at Cardross, outside Helensburgh in south Argyll.

He has now been challenged hard by local Councillor James Robb, on the subject most likely to provoke debate in this largest of Argyll’s towns – the replacement or the cancellation of Trident, the UK’s American, submarine-launched, nuclear weapon system.

With the UK submarine base of Faslane on the doorsteps of Helensburgh, a major employer in the area and a source of steady economic uplift, the town is perennially fearful of any change to the base that might be perceived as driving it into a decline.

There are two live issues around the Faslane submarine base:

• replace Trident – or not
• nuclear waste management

James Robb feel passionately on both fronts, as doe his party, the SNP, that Scotland has to walk away from nuclear power and nuclear armaments on the grounds of long term environmental responsibility.

Faslane, politics and the Trident debate

The SNP argument is that Faslane does not need nuclear armed submarines to be a thriving base for an effective submarine service; and that there is evidenced opinion that Trident is an outdated weapon, a product of cold war thinking and redundant in the face of today’s forms of conflict.

It may well be that the new attack submarine, Astute, nuclear powered but not nuclear armed, may become a focus for an acceptable compromise for defence, for Faslane and for Helensburgh.

Councillor Robb’s issue with Alan Reid is that during the election campaign, Mr Reid promised to oppose the renewal of Trident and that he has broken that promise now by voting against a House of commons amendment intended to force the addition of Trident to the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review. The amendment was table by the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

Saying that Alan Reid’s action in being of a blocking of the attempt to get Trident included in the defence review, James Robb came up with a fabulously reverberant phrase in an interview he gave to the Helensburgh Advertiser.

Focusing on Alan Reid’s part in the madness of persisting in the retention of redundant weaponry, Mr Robb said: ‘With this mentality, as a country we would still be replacing our siege catapults’.

For Argyll has pointed out the utter irrationality of Defence Secretary Liam Fox saying, on the one hand, that a review is a review and must include everything , that it would not be a review if everything was not included in it – and simultaneously excluding Trident from that review.

Alan Reid’s response to James Robb’s accusation that his vote against the amendment has betrayed the trust of those who voted for him on 6th May, is that the amendment was irrelevant.

He has pointed out that the agreement between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in establishing the UK’s new coalition government, specifically laid down that Trident would be subject to a ‘best value’ review before the full Strategic Defence Review begins.

This is intended both to subject Trident to the cost based scrutiny that is, regardless of where one stands on the nuclear debate, its greatest weakness. £50 billion for a weapons systems of debatable utility is hardly the strongest position.

The agreed ‘best value’ review offers the Liberal Democrats the opportunity to make the case for scrapping Trident on cost grounds – which may actually be the strongest and least divisive argument. That is not , of course, to say that it will win.

Trident, conviction, pragmatism and the responsibility of power

A site visitor commented on one of our stories on this issue, that Trident is being retained in order to keep the UK seat in an important UN committee of nuclear powers. This has a ring of plausibility. As a culture, in the UK we find it hard to let go of the past and to take up new positions.

In the debate between these two politicians, the issue comes down to the difference between conviction and pragmatism.

The strength of his anti-nuclear stance marks James Robb as a conviction politician – and we need such people to keep the flame of straightforward, committed politics alive.

Alan Reid is a pragmatist. He pursues the art of the possible and this is where his party currently finds itself. Each of the coalition parties has made concessions and compromises which, however they may also suit their own interests, are also very much in the interests of the nation.

The Liberal Democrats are regarded as the weak point in the team, unused to the responsibilities of power and hardly famed for internal or individual discipline. If their party is to be seen in future as fit to govern it is crucial that its parliamentary members show unequivocally that they can accept the discipline of collaboration – which is about living with compromise.

There are already signs that the current post-budget situation is an enticement to the ‘perennial student’ faction in the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party to cause trouble. Many of these individuals are attractive politicians, perhaps actually because of their tendency to go off piste.

Before they do so in the current circumstances and before, from the sidelines, we cheer them on, they and we need to stop to think of the seriousness of the debt crisis in which the country finds itself.

This is where Mr Reid finds himself and, as a natural pragmatist, it is a position that sits more comfortably with his psyche than it does with some of his colleagues, like those discussed above, who are conviction politicians; or than it would with Mr Robb who is of that same, perhaps more charismatic ilk.

It will though, be down to the Liberal Democrats – and to Mr Reid – to get down to hard work and to drive the ‘best value’ review of Trident to its obvious conclusion.

Faslane, environmental safety, the nuclear waste facility and Argyll and Bute Council

We recently published an article on a report produced by an internal Ministry of Defence committee warning that the nuclear waste facility at Faslane: MoD report: Faslane choice seems to be Trident or nuclear safety.

This article can be read and speaks for itself but it highlights a know situation where the ageing and leaking nuclear waste facility at Faslane has been said by SEPA to become ‘unsafe’ by 2014, by which time it will have to be replaced.

Instead of replacing it, the MoD is dragging its heels – a £50 billion commitment to Trident with everything else cut back, leaves it little choice – and is seeking an extension to the use of the current facility beyond the danger point of 2014.

This is where the two issues come together – money.

It’s Trident or nuclear safety at Faslane. It’s not going to be both although it just might be neither.

With the Argyll environment formally recognised, even within the Mod (as in the report mentioned in the article linked above), one wold expect Argyll and Bute Council to enforce its authority in this matter.

However, the cultural habit of cap-doffing is hard to shake off and the Council has adopted so low a profile position that it could be described as horizontal.

In a meeting of the Executive of the Council on 3rd June 2010, a position was agreed that was arguably a dereliction of duty and is certainly alarmingly complacent.

The facts on this – in the appropriate minute – are attached within the comments to the story linked above. This should be read – and the Council should rethink or publicly defend its position.

How can the SNP, a party resolutely opposed to nuclear power for environmental as well as humanitarian reasons, support a position like this in a council in which it is part of the leading coalition?