SCOTS will pay £1.5 million every day for thirty years to renew the Trident nuclear submarines on the Clyde, according to new analysis.
The Alba Party have used the latest National Records of Scotland (NRS) figures available as well as a House of Commons library report to highlight the daily cost of the UK’s so-called nuclear deterrent to Scotland.
The party have also used an estimate by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that up to £205 billion will be spent on replacing the nuclear deterrent that is based at Faslane and Coulport – which considers in-service costs (at 6% of the defence budget) over the 30 years and the cost of additional factors such as infrastructure investment.
Calculated per head of population, Scotland’s share towards the renewal would be over £16 billion – which then comes to over £1.5m every day over the next 30 years.
All three main pro-independence parties have a policy that the Trident would be swiftly removed from a future independent Scotland.
But now, with this new analysis in mind, former defence worker and Alba’s General Secretary Chris McEleny says that the cost of Trident renewal “must be on the table in the here and now”.
He added: “ When we talk about spending over £200 billion on the next generation of nuclear weapons, it is such an abstract and huge number. But what these figures released by Alba Party today show is what the cost will be every single day.
“It is the equivalent of providing free school lunches to around one hundred and fifty classes every single day or paying an additional fifteen thousand pensioners a winter fuel payment every single day.
“When one in four children in Scotland live in poverty it is obscene to be spending so much money every day for the next thirty years on weapons of mass destruction when that money could instead be invested in Scotland’s future.”
