Some policies are so flawed that their catastrophic shortcomings can be articulated in a single image. General election campaigns are peppered with examples of visual messages so reductively powerful that they isolate, in the minds of voters, the essence of why they shouldn’t vote for a party or candidate.

Margaret Thatcher was already on her way to a convincing victory in 1979 when the Conservative party ran its now infamous ‘Labour isn’t working’ billboard advertisement, depicting a long queue of people snaking out from an unemployment office.

The same party won again in 1987 thanks, in large part, to a campaign poster depicting a British soldier, arms held aloft in surrender, above the headline “Labour’s policy on arms”.

The image conveyed more effectively than any number of words or debates the futility of Labour’s then policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

HMS Victorious (Image: free)

It was a moment of awakening for the party, which had abandoned its long held commitment to an independent UK nuclear deterrent seven years earlier, under the sclerotic and dangerously deluded leadership of Michael Foot.

An extensive defence policy review confirmed, in the minds of the new leadership, that if it was ever to hold power again, it needed to grow up.

The naïve belief that a nuclear power single-handedly disarming would ultimately lead to every other state with nuclear weapons following its example, thereby making the world a safer place, was always for the birds.

Almost 30 years on, that remains the policy of the SNP which describes nuclear weapons as “wrong strategically, morally and financially”.

While its politicians stick steadfastly to talking only about arrangements for an independent Scotland, the implication is clear: it believes the UK government’s spending on nuclear weapons is immoral and wasteful and that it should unilaterally disarm.

Sir Keir Starmer’s........

© Herald Scotland