Following the Scottish independence referendum the Smith Commission has been taking the views of political parties and the public on what further powers should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. Its setting up followed promises by the major UK parties in the immediate lead-up to the vote to extend Holryrood’s powers. The following is the submission by Trident Ploughshares:
It is vital that we recognise that the Smith Commission is not a disconnected process of technical consultation but instead arises from a very special phase in the country’s history, and from a very specific set of circumstances. The Commission is a response to a sense of serious disorder in our communal life – the conviction among so many that the present set of political and constitutional arrangements successfully militate against our aspirations for a more socially just society, a sustainable future, and our potential contribution to a peaceful world. Unless the Commission does in fact deal with this disorder it will merely compound the sense of frustration that it supposedly was set up to address.
The desire for the removal of the UK’s nuclear weapons from Scotland (and the concomitant challenge to the UK to disarm) has been a prominent feature in the campaign for Scottish independence.This is hardly surprising. Most people in Scotland,including many who voted NO in the independence referendum, utterly reject Trident.As well as being a deadly reality, the UK’s nuclear arsenal is also a powerful indicative symbol of the atavistic Neighbourhood-Watch-Gone-Mad attitudes that have such a stranglehold on the British state. Any set of recommendations produced by the Commission that fails to acknowledge just how intolerable that stranglehold is to so many people in Scotland will not amount to a resolution of the problem.
We therefore call on the Commission to consider how the aspirations of the Scottish people to be rid of nuclear weapons can be addressed.