The Scottish Government is hosting an anti-Trident summit in Glasgow today. Ahead of the meeting, Alex Salmond has written to the the signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty seeking observer status at their meetings.
Although Trident is a reserved issue, Iain McWhirter argues that his hand is stronger than it may appear:
It's actually very difficult to argue a coherent case against Scotland having a presence at international disarmament talks, since Scotland has had the dubious honour of hosting Britain's nuclear deterrent for 40 years. In June, a majority of MSPs in the Scottish Parliament voted against Trident renewal, as did a majority of Scottish MPs in Westminster in March.
But David Cairns, the Scotland Office minister, says that Alex Salmond should be sorting out the free personal care instead of "cavorting across the world stage with his discredited loony-left policies" and giving comfort to our enemies. Well, they are also his loony policies, since Labour is still formally committed to pursuing "multilateral nuclear disarmament" under a defence policy which dates from the late 1980s.
If he is saying that the presence of an anti-nuclear Scottish Government representative at the NNPT talks might be an embarrassment, then fair enough. But Britain has every cause to be embarrassed, since we've driven a coach and horses through the NNPT by renewing the Trident missile system. Article VI of the NNPT requires signatory nations to work toward "cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament". (The Herald)
