It's beyond obvious why Tories called a vote on Trident renewal instead of concentrating on the really important and urgent task of figuring out what the Tory plan for Brexit actually is.
The Tories know that Trident renewal is one of the biggest divisions in the Labour Party so they decided to score party political points by calling a debate on a Labour Party sore issue instead of concentrating on the fundamentally important task of actually dealing with Brexit, which is one of their own sore issues and also the reason the economy and political system are in such chaos and the thing that should undoubtedly be the over-riding priority of the government.
Political point scoring
The fact that this vote was just a display of party political points scoring was absolutely obvious because the legislation being debated consisted of just 14 lines of text and included absolutely no budget whatever. Essentially the Tories asked parliament to write a blank cheque for the corporate contractors who stand to make £billions from renewing the UK's privatised stockpile of unusable doomsday machines*.
The Westminster establishment club duly voted, by a whopping majority to squander untold £billions on nuclear weapons, which could be used as yet more ammunition against Jeremy Corbyn who (alongside the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party) opposed the immoral and economically unjustifiable plan to write the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history in order to build a new set of British weapons of mass destruction.
Deflecting attention away from the biggest split in the Tory party (Europe) and the chaos and economic uncertainty it has caused by driving a wedge into the biggest split in the Labour Party is a cynical move, and it's been successful in provoking even more Labour divisions. However this display of opportunistic political point-scoring at a time when the government should have been concentrating on fixing their own Brexit mess did throw up a couple of significant problems for Theresa May and the Tories too.
Scotland
The first major problem is that 58 of the 59 MPs representing Scottish constituencies voted against the renewal of Trident. The idea that it is in any way morally justifiable to keep the UK's nuclear submarine base at Faslane, just 25 miles from Scotland's most populous city, is absurdly anti-democratic when the overwhelming majority of Scottish MPs oppose Trident. If English people want to hoard a stockpile of mass indiscriminate slaughter machines, then surely they should keep them in their own country, not in a country that wants nothing to do with them.
Holding a vote on Trident renewal immediately after Scotland voted so heavily in favour of Remain looks like a policy of deliberately antagonising the Scottish electorate and increasing the already significant momentum behind the campaign for a second Scottish independence referendum.
Mass indiscriminate slaughter
When asked by the Scottish National MP George Kerevan whether she would authorise a nuclear strike that would kill 100,000 innocent men women and children, Theresa May didn't even hesitate to say that she would mass execute huge numbers of non-combatants.
Only days after she came to power in a cloud of hopelessly misleading rhetoric about how much she cares about the poor, the vulnerable and the working class, she's admitted that she'd incinerate tens of thousands of innocent people.
Maybe people who knew nothing about Theresa May's toxic track record at the Home Office, her appalling use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, her family destroying immigration policies, her disgusting parliamentary voting record and her opposition to human rights ... might have lapped up all the mainstream media rhetoric about her being a sane and sensible "safe pair of hands", but her willingness to incinerate vast numbers of innocent men, women and children, for whatever reason, is an absolutely chilling demonstration that she's a dangerous fanatic.
Her willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians also demonstrates what a searing hypocrite she is. In 2003 she voted in favour of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What hypocrisy it is to support the catastrophically under-prepared invasion and occupation of a country because their leader might have weapons of mass destruction, when you then go on to admit that you'd slaughter thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
When it comes to willingness to commit horrific acts of mass slaughter, why is it considered acceptable for Theresa May to say that she would willingly incinerate tens of thousands of innocent people in a nuclear furnace, yet if she said that she was willing to kill the same people by means of a carefully orchestrated kill-on-sight genocide policy, chemical or biological weapons or in extermination camps there would be a huge outcry about it.
What is it about the most environmentally devastating form of mass genocide possible that makes it a "sensible" thing for a politician to admit a willingness to do, when other equally deadly forms of mass genocide are rightly considered to be morally indefensible?
Conclusions
The Tory decision to hold a vote on Trident instead of concentrating on the much more urgent task of resolving their own Brexit mess was a staggeringly cynical piece of political opportunism. It did manage to achieve its main objective of triggering even more Labour Party infighting, but it also came at a price. The Trident vote not only drove a wedge into the Labour Party, but it also hammered another huge wedge into the rift between pro-EU, anti-Trident Scotland and anti-EU pro-Trident England.
Another significant issue is that Theresa May massively undermined all of her soft-Tory rhetoric by admitting that she'd willingly commit a savage act of mass indiscriminate genocide, and also exposed herself as a wanton hypocrite in the process.
Of course a lot of mainstream media rote-learners are going to continue to believe the propaganda line that Theresa May is a sane, level-headed "safe pair of hands" despite the fact that she's prepared to deliberately antagonise Scotland in order to score political points against Labour and openly admits that she'd be willing to commit the most heinous act of instantaneous genocide in British history.
Anyone with the thinking skills to understand the cynicism of her political maneuvering and the magnitude of what she said about the mass killing of non-combatants has to understand that she's a dangerous and utterly ruthless individual who doesn't give a damn about the consequences her actions have on other people's lives (although, as I previously mentioned, you would know that about her already if you knew about her parliamentary voting record and her toxic track record at the Home Office).
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* = Interestingly, despite all of the faux concern over the jobs supported by the nuclear weapons industry, the names of the corporations that stand to make £billions from Trident renewal (Lockheed Martin, Jacobs Engineering, Serco) were not mentioned a single time in the entire parliamentary debate.
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