STUC policy has been opposed to Trident and has supported unilateral nuclear disarmament for many years. 

The STUC and CND launched the report Trident and Jobs: The Case for a Scottish Defence Diversification Agency at last year’s Congress. 

As the 2016 general council report notes, together with the STUC’s 2007 report, it was a significant and well-regarded body of work against the renewal of Trident.

However, at this year’s Congress there is a challenge to current policy with a motion from the GMB which supports the Trident Successor Programme, claiming this would protect “tens of thousands of workers in the defence manufacturing industries.”

The GMB is rightly concerned about the security of future employment and the retention of the terms and conditions of its members in the defence industry, as are other trade unions.  

But is Trident replacement in the best interest on the jobs front for defence workers?

Unsurprisingly, the motion fails to mention the nature of this work on Britain’s own weapons of mass destruction and slaughter.

Difficult as it is to put to one side the moral aspect of Trident renewal, given the effect that a nuclear exchange would have on our planet, the economic arguments on jobs fails to stand up to scrutiny.

The government’s own strategic defence and security review for 2015 reports a 20 per cent increase in the estimated manufacturing cost of Trident since 2011.  

SCND argues that replacing Britain’s nuclear weapons system will create far fewer jobs than predicted and, because the cost of Trident is coming out of the defence budget, will come at the expense of many thousands of other defence jobs.  

As shipyard workers on the Clyde will tell you, an order for 13 Type-26 frigates was due to be placed this year. Instead it has been reduced to eight. 

In the current financial climate of cuts, there will be major employment consequences for Scotland and defence workers if Trident is not cancelled.

The STUC/CND report gives a detailed analysis of cost, posts that directly rely on Trident, timescales for change, skills breakdown, home location, staff age profile, site details, local economic alternatives, and more, and is well worth study. 

Locally in Scotland at Faslane and Coulport only around 500 jobs would have to be redeployed.

However, to answer GMB’s criticism of diversification as being too vague and with no credible costed alternatives guaranteeing jobs, pay and conditions, the real problem has been a lack of resources and the political will to fund the alternatives.

No less than 40 years ago, workers at Lucas Aerospace formed an alternative corporate plan to convert military production to socially useful and environmentally desirable production. 

J

ust over a decade later workers at BAE shipyard in Barrow formulated plans for a reallocation to civilian production on R&D on wind and marine technology. The problem was that these proposals were not acted on. 

Denmark and Germany have now taken the technological lead in wind-related technologies, while in Barrow itself thousands of jobs have been lost as a result of naval budget cuts.

One of the most relevant sections of the STUC/SCND report is Arms Conversion: Learning from Elsewhere.

Our government is called on to adopt the best practice of, ironically, the US government with its base realignment and closure programme. 

This requires the government, five years before the closure of any base or manufacturing facility, to initiate planning and investment for its alternative use with the requirement of fully replacing all jobs.

This argument was picked up by Jeremy Corbyn in a defence diversification briefing launched in August last year, saying that many facilities in the US had successfully made the transition to a post-nuclear age and that we needed to learn from best practice around the world.

He gave a clear commitment to establish a defence diversification agency to focus on ensuring a just transformation for communities whose livelihoods are based in sectors such as Trident so that engineering and scientific skills are not lost but are transferred into more socially productive industries.

Corbyn said defence diversification was about working with workers in the defence industry to identify how the skills they have and the technology they work on can be put to more socially productive use.

The STUC at its 2014 Congress called for the establishment of such an agency “whose main focus will be planning and resourcing the diversification of jobs away from defence projects, such as Trident, and promoting the greening of the Scottish economy.”

The SCND/STUC document lays out our key task in Scotland and across Britain — work with the existing anti-Trident opposition in the military establishment, within political parties, the trade unions, the faith communities, and the anti-austerity movement to build a broad and powerful alliance of political forces that can kill off the project once and for all.

Given the SNP government position on Trident and a Corbyn-led Labour Party this is a very real possibility. Time for the GMB to get on board?

• Tom Morrison is Scottish secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.