In April, a former leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Ian Blackford, sparked an internal debate in the SNP after urging the current party leadership to reconsider its long-standing support for unilateral nuclear disarmament: the policy that the UK will give up its nuclear weapons regardless of whether other nuclear weapon states do the same, in an op-ed printed in The Times. In lieu of this approach, Blackford advocated for the party to instead adopt multilateral disarmament, which entails the UK disarming its nuclear arsenal in coordination with other nuclear-armed states. Despite these calls, the current leader of the SNP, along with other past and present party figures, have continued to advocate for unilateral nuclear disarmament – a stance that drew criticism from Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Successive UK governments have consistently affirmed their commitment to multilateral disarmament, one of the three core pillars of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which the UK is a state party.
There have also been calls by Scottish Labour for the SNP to revise its opposition to nuclear energy and consider embracing nuclear power as part of Scotland’s future energy mix. Both proposals to support multilateral disarmament and nuclear energy would amount to a departure from the party’s stated positions in its 2024 manifesto, which reasserted the SNP’s commitment to scrapping the Trident nuclear weapons system and moving away from nuclear energy.