Raising the stakes on Scottish nukes

SNP activists and politicians visiting their party HQ near the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on Thursday morning will need to step over some dead bodies. Direct action group Trident Ploughshares is holding a "die-in" protest against Alex Salmond's plan to ditch the Nats' longstanding anti-Nato policy.

Trident Ploughshares have chosen Nagasaki day - August 9 - for the protest at SNP HQ to link the horrors of the US nuclear attacks on Japan 67 years ago to the fact the Nato is a nuclear-armed alliance.

They also joined last week with Scottish CND, Stop the War Scotland, the Faslane Peace Camp, the Scottish Greens, the Scottish Socialist Party and others to set up the No to Nato Scotland Coalition, precisely to campaign for the SNP to keep its anti-Nato position.

The new coalition's statement of reasons for opposing membership of Nato is clear.

"Nato is a nuclear-armed alliance with over 5,000 nuclear weapons. It was established for mutual defence during the cold war and should have been disbanded when the Soviet Union collapsed.

"Instead it has expanded and become an aggressive alliance force engaged in expeditionary wars.

"For nearly 10 years it has been conducting the war in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of civilians have died and three million people have become refugees. It is also placing a 'missile defence' system in Europe which is provoking a new arms race with Russia."

A couple of weeks ago I predicted in this column that the SNP's planned Nato U-turn would breach its anti-nukes policy too, which would then allow Alex Salmond to negotiate over keeping Trident in Scotland rather than getting rid of the weapons in the event of Scottish "independence."

And I hoped that Salmond would be held to account by his own supporters on this issue.

It looks as though this is starting to happen.

Along with the pressure from the wider Scottish peace movement, Salmond now faces within the SNP what is usually described in the media as "mounting internal opposition" to defence spokesman Angus Robertson's motion to party conference in October supporting Nato membership.

Six MSPs have defied a party HQ gagging order issued last week - itself an indicator of some nervousness - and backed a rival amendment stating "the SNP position will be that Scotland should not remain a member of Nato."

John Finnie, Dave Thompson, Jean Urquhart, Sandra White and John Wilson all stepped up to publicly endorse the amendment proposed by Cumbernauld and Kilsyth MSP Jamie Hepburn.

The closing date for conference amendments is this Friday August 10 and up to half a dozen other MSPs are thought to be prepared to support the move.

One interesting name not (yet) on that list is Bill Kidd. The left-wing MSP for Glasgow Anniesland is a long-term anti-nuclear campaigner - and contributor to the Morning Star - but is also an SNP whip and was quoted at the weekend as saying he "could handle" Nato membership.

The SNP's CND group will be meeting on Saturday August 25 at the STUC Centre in Glasgow to launch the campaign opposing the party's Nato U-turn.

According to CND and trade union activist Bill Ramsay: "This is the first time the party has had any open debate on this issue for some years. We intend to flesh out our critique of why joining Nato will damage the Yes campaign and the referendum."

The SNP trade union group has already agreed to oppose the leadership move to embrace Nato.

Group convenor John Duffy, who is FBU Scotland secretary and has also written for the Morning Star, was clear about the link between Nato and Trident when he said last week that "the key point we'll be making is that if we are to remain in Nato then it would make it harder to get rid of Trident."

For me, though, the comment which best sums up the situation the SNP is now in is this quote from an unnamed SNP activist. "If you give up before you have fought, you are new Labour in 10 minutes.

"A lot of the brighter MSPs recognise that. As soon as the leadership win on Nato, they'll be wanting to keep Trident next."

So there's clearly a fight on, which in itself is unusual. The SNP has been almost preternaturally disciplined in the current Salmond era. And there's a reason for that.

Salmond has clearly been using the Blair/Mandelson manual, and not just the oft-borrowed chapter on triangulating your way to electoral victory. He's also studied the section on mounting a coup d'etat from above in your own party.

Party members turning the leader over is never in the leader's script for party conference. That's true whatever political party you consider. In the case of the SNP today, the leader is in a powerful position to enforce his will.

Salmond will want to make sure that it is he who walks over the - purely metaphorical - dead bodies of his SNP left opponents in October and not the other way round.

The point the Trident Ploughshares Nagasaki day "die-in" seeks to make is that it will much more likely be real dead bodies which get trampled under Salmond's pro-nuclear Nato U-turn.