Faslane and its surrounds could be economically devastated if Trident were removed. Would an SNP government really be able to keep that promise?
What arguments rage at the home of Britain's nuclear deterrent? At teatime, very polite ones. "No, Jean, put your purse away," one silver-haired lady says to another in the Craigard Tearoom. "Och, but Agnes, you paid the last time," says the other. Scone-crumbs fleck their plates; the lemon meringue pie has been resisted; absent friends have been remembered; nobody hurries to get home.
Helensburgh has several such eating places, along with a greengrocer, a good butcher, a fishmonger, a wool shop, a couple of delis and a china warehouse, R&A Urie, which must have been selling dinner plates, whisky decanters and figurines since the days of the last King Edward. To describe the town as genteel would be only half the story: the seafront is a dilapidated jumble of failing commerce and cheap modernism. But in a country where the social division is west-east rather than England's north-south, Helensburgh is an exception to the rule that wealth declines the further you move from the North Sea to the Atlantic. Look out from Helensburgh's promenade and there, a few miles across the Clyde, is Greenock, still struggling to find an economy after shipbuilding's collapse, a town that obeys the west-east rule down to the last shuttered pub.
Historic purpose explains some of Helensburgh's difference. Never industrial, it was first a sea-bathing resort and then, after the railway came, the farthest-flung Glasgow suburb, attracting businessmen rich enough to commission villas from architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose Hill House is about to be eclipsed as the town's star attraction by a new Waitrose. There are only four other Waitrose stores in Scotland, catering for the urban elites of Glasgow and Edinburgh. That Helensburgh – not oil-rich Aberdeen – should get the fifth may say a little about the sophistication of a town that gave the world Jack Buchanan and Deborah Kerr, but it says much more about the cold war and British defence policy in the 1980s. The Trident base at Faslane, a few miles to the north, has maintained Helensburgh's unusual prosperity. Without Faslane – and without the Trident D5 missile, each with warheads capable of a hundred Hiroshimas – the boon of Waitrose's luxury pork sausages would likely be dropped elsewhere.
"The most militarised district in western Europe is also the scene of retirement and improving leisure," the writer James Buchan once observed, "as if the US had collected its entire nuclear forces in West Hampton, New York, or the French at Deauville." And so it is, though the evidence in town is benign. English voices mingle with Scottish ones in Helensburgh's streets, while Urie's china store is stacked with royal jubilee mugs and The Buffet delicatessen is strewn with little union flags, which also flutter from the odd garden flagpole. In the rest of Scotland, such tokens of Britishness are rarer than they were, now the saltire's blue and white have become the colours of national feeling.
I took the road up the Gareloch, past the marinas and yacht clubs until the razor wire rose on my left. I've been here several times before, but the sheer scale of Faslane is somehow always a surprise. An innocent visitor might imagine a wharf, a few cranes, some sheds and a submarine. But throughout the 1980s and 90s, the military worked like God to reshape the landscape – or rather landscapes in the plural, because nuclear submarines are armed at Coulport on Loch Long as well serviced and crewed at Faslane on the Gareloch. At Coulport, a covered handling jetty "as tall as Nelson's Column and as long as two football pitches" (to quote the National Audit Office) enables warheads to be fixed and unfixed from missiles without taking the missiles from their tubes in the submarine. Five miles away at Faslane, a ship lift as big as Wembley Stadium (another NAO analogy) can raise a 15,900-ton submarine high enough to allow maintenance of its pressure hulls and sensors.
These are the centrepieces. There are also smaller workshops, barracks, watch towers, jetties, canteens, arms dumps, and roads to connect them all. To quote Buchan again, Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde "looks like Guantánamo Bay at a higher latitude". The Ministry of Defence has never built anything larger or more complicated. It employs around 7,000 people, a workforce that has been increasingly outsourced to civilian contractors; another 4,000 depend on it as a main source of income. Scotland has no larger single industrial enterprise, and yet the Scottish National Party has said that an independent Scotland would demand it pack its bags and leave.
True, the words have been softened over the years. What in 1992 was a pledge "to order nuclear weapons and installations off our soil" had become by 2001 the promise to "negotiate the safe removal of Trident from Scotland". But any further softening looks unlikely, given the protest that ensued inside the party last month when the leadership proposed dropping its traditional opposition to the idea that an independent Scotland join Nato. In theory, then, one of the first acts of an independent Scottish government would be to start a process that ended in it handing out thousands of P45s. The SNP insists that it has plans for Faslane as "a vibrant and sustainable conventional naval base", but which small, peaceable country needs such sophisticated naval equipment and so many workers? The whole of Ireland's navy can put to sea with a crew totalling no more than 1,200.
To drive over the high road from the Gareloch to Loch Long, with the Faslane base spread out below, is to be struck with three impossibilities. First, that something so vast could ever be easily uprooted. Second, that a pragmatic government would damage or destroy a local economy for the sake of its anti-nuclear principles. Third, that the rump government of the United Kingdom could afford to build a replacement for Faslane south of the border, even if it could find a locality willing to take it.
So in the process of Scottish independence, as yet hypothetical, my guess is that Trident will become a bargaining chip to be deployed by Edinburgh's negotiating team in exchange for a big London favour. (Bigger oil rights? A smaller share of the national debt?) Its bases will survive where they are on leasehold into the mid-2020s, when the submarines are due to be replaced, at a currently estimated cost of £25bn. But, sadly for the shipworkers of Barrow, there will be no replacements. A truncated UK will then have lost the taste and the budget for "punching above its weight", and Trident submarines will be seen as what they are: a strange consequence of British military ambition in the last century, as beautiful and terrible in their way as the Dreadnought, though unlike the Dreadnought (one hopes) never used. And so they will quietly pass away, leaving Helensburgh's Waitrose among their monuments.