This is while the UK Parliament is set to vote on the program’s renewal on Monday, which if finalized, will allow the Defense Ministry to build more nuclear submarines.
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‘And it would be a gross irresponsibility to lose the ability to meet such threats by discarding the ultimate insurance against those risks in the future.
Labour’s official party policy remains in favour of renewing Trident – at an estimated cost of £40billion – despite the leader’s long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons.
The decision to hold an immediate vote on Trident has plunged Mr Corbyn into a fresh crisis as his party is deeply divided on the issue.
The Times has reported that more than half of Labour MPs are expected to break ranks with their leader and support the nuclear deterrent.
Deputy leader Tom Watson acknowledged the vote was “partisan political game-playing” but described abstaining as an “abdication of responsibility” as Labour splits came to the fore.
“To abandon our deterrent in that context would be a grotesque abandonment of our friends at a time of great peril”, he said.
The Barrow and Furness MP told BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour: “It’s hard to understand why Labour has a free vote on such a fundamental matter of national security except to spare the blushes of the leader who doesn’t believe in the Labour Party’s established policies, but let’s see”.
Labour officially remains in favour of replacing the four submarines to give the United Kingdom a continuous nuclear weapons presence at sea, although this is subject to a long-running internal party review.
Gwen Sinclair, who is attending a demonstration in Kilmarnock, said: “We want to make sure that the Trident question gets full attention in the middle of all the other political shenanigans – after all Faslane is only 32 miles from here”.
Labour’s shadow defence secretary, Clive Lewis, and Emily Thornberry, promoted to shadow foreign secretary following mass resignations from Labour’s frontbench, urged MPs to abstain from the vote. Smith said he had changed his mind 15 years earlier, and now believed the UK’s nuclear capability should be kept “until we can use it as a bargaining chip to get everybody to get rid of their nuclear weapons”.
While the majority of Labour MPs are expected to vote in favour of Trident renewal, Scottish Labour party delegates overwhelmingly backed a vote to scrap the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system at their conference a year ago.
The Tories committed in their 2015 general election manifesto to replacing the Vanguard class of submarine which carries Trident missiles with four new successor class boats. We use it everyday to deter the most extreme threats this country faces. That is a gamble I’m not prepared to take’.
The Scottish Scrap Trident Coalition, which organised the rallies, said around 7,000 people had attended.
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Brendan O’Hara, the SNP’s defence spokesman in Westminster, said: “It is obscene that Theresa May thinks the priority at a time of Tory austerity and economic uncertainty following the European Union referendum is to spend billions on outdated nuclear weapons that we do not want, do not need, and could never use”.
