A new poll in Scotland shows that voters are against giving taxpayers money to arms manufacturers. This is despite a concerted propaganda push by the UK government criticising the Scottish Government’s restrictions on funds under its control going to arms for Israel.
The poll by Find Out Now showed 44% of Scottish voters opposed public money going to arms companies, around 26% supported the idea, while around 31% said they didn’t know.
The poll was commissioned in the light of the Scottish Government relaxing its total ban to allow funds for arming Ukraine which wasn’t enough to satisfy UK ministers, one of whom even went as far as branding the Scottish Government “a threat to national security”.
The Scottish survey follows a poll in Switzerland last month that showed 72% want their government to join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and the success of a campaign, supported by ICAN, to gather the more than 100,000 signatures needed to hold a referendum on joining the treaty.
Earlier last year, a survey by YouGov found that that people across western Europe were opposed to their countries getting nuclear weapons despite leading politicians floating the idea publicly.
These developments show that publics in Europe are not convinced by their governments current push to spend on rearming because of fear of Russia and concerns about whether the United States under President Trump is a reliable ally.
The Head of Communications for the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Alistair Burnett, said: “Instead of spending more on nuclear and conventional weapons, European leaders need to stop panicking and invest in policies that offer their citizens true guarantees of their security. This means investing in measures to deal with the climate crisis and the destruction of nature that human survival depends on, as well as in pursuing dialogue and diplomacy with adversaries – this involves compromise, but it is the sensible alternative to the current zero-sum approach that only guarantees increasing tensions and an even greater risk of conflict which could end in nuclear catastrophe.”
2026 is set to be a crucial year for global security with the US making clear its aim to dominate the Western Hemisphere with its attack on Venezuela, threats to other Latin American countries and its pressure on its NATO ally Denmark to cede Greenland, while efforts to end the war in Ukraine move slowly and the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the US expires in early February.
There will be two major international conferences on nuclear weapons this year as well. The members of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) meet in April for their 11th review conference and the members of the TPNW meet for their first review conference later in the year. Both conferences offer an opportunity to make progress on disarmament. The nuclear-armed countries and their allies who endorse the use of nuclear weapons have an opportunity to join the global majority of countries which support disarmament. But whatever they decide to do, the TPNW conference is expected to agree on measures to further strengthen the treaty.
