Defence has never been the strongest suit of the SNP – ever since the late Alex Salmond dismissed air strikes against Serbia in 1999 as ‘unpardonable folly’.
In fact, the British intervention in Kosovo ended what the United Nations later described as ‘a systematic campaign of terror’.
Three years ago, Nicola Sturgeon called for a ‘no-fly zone’ above Ukraine – a move which experts warned could trigger a Third World War.
It’s on this ramshackle basis that hapless John Swinney and his colleagues have made their latest stumbling intervention into the pressing matter of defending the realm.
Mr Swinney last week reiterated the SNP’s opposition to the Trident nuclear deterrent – though admittedly it was hard to figure out his justification for the continuation of his bizarre heard-in-the-sand approach.
He said he was against the possession of nuclear weapons, adding: ‘There’s obviously resources that could have been spent alternatively on defence than on Trident missiles, which are not stopping conflict in the world today and they’re not able to be deployed in the current challenges we face.’
Yet the whole point of these weapons is that no one is able to deploy them without fearing a reciprocal response – and the threat of mutually assured destruction has prevented global nuclear warfare for decades.
Stopping ‘conflict in the world today’ is a noble aim but it’s pie-in-the-sky nonsense to suppose that it could ever happen – and one wonders where Mr Swinney would rather spend the money.
Alas, when it comes to granular detail he had nothing much to say, and nor did his colleague Fiona Hyslop, the Transport Secretary, who reiterated the SNP’s rejection of Trident during BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday.
In a rambling answer to a question about whether or not the SNP is opposed to Trident, Ms Hyslop said her party is ‘against nuclear weapons – it always has been’, adding: ‘We are a target here, having nuclear bases here, I understand why our allies are very interested in our position on this.
‘I don’t believe in terms of where we go that it is the way to defend the country in the longer term.’
Make of that incoherent reply what you will, but Ms Hyslop went on to condemn the ‘undermining of the conventional defence forces’.
She lamented that ‘we are a coastal nation and Russian submarines are frequently at the north of Scotland – and you know where we’re defended from? Southampton.’
This strange assertion led to her conclude that ‘maritime support isn’t there for Scotland’, as if Trident – based at Faslane on the Clyde – didn’t exist.
The SNP viscerally loathes the weapons programme which keeps us safe from nuclear aggressors but is happy to imply that the UK Government, which funds and backs Trident, has left Scotland woefully under-defended.
Submarines from Faslane and interceptor and maritime patrol aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth are critical to defending the north of Scotland.
Mr Swinney and his clueless cohorts are churning out the kind of drivel that would shame a school debating society, clinging on to the easy platitudes of the past while ignoring the cold, hard realities of the present.
It was left to Tory MSP Megan Gallacher to spell out the potentially dire consequences of shutting down Faslane – including the loss of 13,250 jobs.
An exasperated Douglas Alexander, now a UK Government trade minister, pointed out that NATO is a nuclear alliance – so that an anti-Trident stance is incompatible with membership.
The SNP states that it intends to ‘take its place as a member state in its own right of both the European Union and NATO’ in the event of independence – in time-honoured fashion, the Nationalists want to have their cake and eat it.
Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford, a former SNP defence spokesman, suggested that the party’s General Election manifesto last year ‘served more to maintain internal party unity than to persuade the broader electorate’.
He concluded that the SNP can ‘rest easy in the knowledge that they will have no opportunity to deliver their defence promises in the near future’.
It is true that Denmark and Norway are in NATO – and don’t allow nuclear weapons on their territory.
Mind you, Jens Stoltenberg said when he was Nato secretary general that an independent Scotland would ‘not automatically’ become a member of the group – and would have to gain the approval of all 28 allies before it could rejoin as a new country.
Ms Hyslop rightly highlighted that the Armed Forces had been run down by successive governments – as Mr Alexander conceded, Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh could accommodate the entire 75,000-strong British Army.
Yet it’s worth remembering that the SNP’s White Paper defence plans ahead of the 2014 independence referendum appeared to have been sketched out on the back of a fag packet – and amounted to a kind of Dad’s Army Third World militia.
The bolstering of our sorely depleted Armed Forces has been belatedly prioritised by Sir Keir Starmer – something that probably wouldn’t have happened without a Trump presidency – with a commitment to increase defence expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP from April 2027, and an ambition to reach 3 per cent in the next parliament.
Back in 2021, the SNP’s then Commons defence spokesman Stewart McDonald warned against the UK Government’s plan to increase its nuclear warheads stockpile, describing it as an ‘expensive folly [there’s that word again] that should be cancelled with immediate effect’.
Yet at the weekend German political scientist Maximilian Terhalle, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said Europe needs to acquire nearly a thousand more nuclear warheads if it hopes to deter Vladimir Putin.
The scale of the nuclear stockpile in the UK is unclear – but the ceiling is no more than 260 warheads, whereas Europe only has several hundred.
There are also calls to ramp up production of warships, given that Scotland is considered to be at the heart of the Royal Navy’s warship-building – with two Frigate programmes that will deliver 13 UK vessels in the coming years.
Scotland is also the base for P8 Poseidon submarine-hunting aircraft and half of the UK’s Typhoon fast jet fleet, with RAF Lossiemouth supporting around 3,600 jobs, and 10 per cent of the local economy.
Critical elements of the new Dreadnought class of submarine, which will replace Vanguard as our continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, are being shaped at Rosyth and on the Clyde.
All of which is happening despite the SNP’s fervent opposition to Trident – it prefers to continue inhabiting a parallel universe, while threats to our security continue to multiply in the real one.
We need leaders who can be taken seriously on defence of the realm – not sixth-form fantasists who are willing to gamble with national safety to advance their own narrow political agenda.