SCRAPPING Trident will feature on the SNP’s post-election “wish list”, Ian Blackford has suggested.

Speaking on Remembrance Sunday, Blackford, the party’s Westminster leader, said the SNP takes “responsibilities for defence seriously” and suggested that conventional defences are not given sufficient priority.

However, he told Sky News: “We don’t believe that we should be investing in those weapons of mass destruction.”

And, when asked about any SNP “red lines” for working with other parties in the event of a hung parliament this December, he stated that the party will “come up with a wish list of things that we want to see,” adding: “We’ve been pretty consistent down through the decades that we don’t wish to see nuclear weapons on our soil.

“We want to make sure of course that we take our responsibilities for defence seriously, and I think it’s important to say that today of all days when we’ve got Remembrance Sunday to look forward to.

“But we don’t believe that we should be investing in those weapons of mass destruction.”

Estimates put the full-life cost of replacing Trident at as much as £200 billion, though numbers vary wildly.

Blackford was speaking on Sophy Ridge on Sunday and said he wants his party to “improve on” the 35 seats it won at the last snap general election in 2017.

That marked a significant drop from the 56 secured two years earlier.

READ MORE: Labour and Tories continue to lose candidates ahead of General election The SNP has signalled a willingness to work with a Labour government if the chance arises after the December 12 vote. Jeremy Corbyn has said he would authorise an independence referendum if there is a mandate for it, but not within the first years of his premiership.

Addressing this, Blackford said: “What everyone has to recognise, whether it’s Boris Johnson, whether it’s Jeremy Corbyn, is that when the SNP went to the polls in 2016 for the Scottish election, we did that on a manifesto commitment that if there was a change in circumstances then we’d reserve the right to have a referendum.

“We won that election with the government in Scotland, and any Prime Minister should respect democracy. It should be the Scottish people, the Scottish Parliament, that decides when and how we’re having a referendum and we’ll not be stopped by Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else.”

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said he had “deep concerns” that a governing pact between Labour and the SNP could “put at risk Scotland and the UK’s security in a changing and dangerous world”.

MP Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokesperson, told the Sunday Times that Trident removal would be a “priority” in post-election talks and criticised the decision by Tory ministers to “slash conventional forces while spending billions on unusable, immoral nuclear weapons”.

Sturgeon: If SNP win election we will have indyref2 in 2020 The SNP has advocated for the use of HM Naval Base Clyde, the current home of the Trident fleet, as a conventional defence base.

But Wallace told that newspaper that the SNP “want to have their cake and to eat it”, adding: “They want the jobs and the base at Faslane but not the submarines.”

He continued: “Russian submarines are in the North Atlantic and there is an aggressive Russian posture across Eastern Europe threatening Nato allies.

“Trident is a really important deterrent against them. Corbyn is rolling the dice over Britain’s defence and Sturgeon is doing the same with Scotland’s security.”

Meanwhile, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said many armed forces members and veterans were still “not getting the support they deserve”.

He said: “For so many of our armed forces, our veterans and their families who have given and still give so much to us, they are not getting the support they deserve.

“Service men and women have faced pay cuts, service accommodation left in disrepair, and are worried their children are left without the support that they need.”

On the same day, Chief of Defence Staff Sir Nick Carter urged serious consideration for issues relating to the armed forces.

He said the UK and its allies face “very diverse” threats including terrorism and migration and warned that the actions of Russia, China and Iran could “easily lead to inadvertent miscalculation” and increase the chance of war.

Carter said Nato is as important now as it was during the Cold War, telling Sky News: “We all had a huge amount of optimism in 1989 as the [Berlin] Wall came down ... but the reality is the world has changed, it’s moved on.

“We now have what I think would be characterised as global competition between great powers.

“Nato’s relevance is now back to where it was during the Cold War ... I think in many ways it’s never been as important in its 70 years of its life.

“We’re living through a period of phenomenal change at the moment. It’s change that is probably more enormous than even the two world wars combined, and the pace of it is increasing rapidly.

“On the basis of that, I think we do need to think pretty hard about how as a nation we’re going to manage that change and it matters to our armed forces hugely.”

Sir Nick said the armed forces had never been more popular with the public in his lifetime, but warned the popularity could be based on “sympathy not empathy”.

He added: “Our veterans and armed forces don’t want to be pitied ... they want to be respected”.