Graeme Downie MP says Britain is already in an unconventional war with Russia and argues that “our deterrence is our people” as skills shortages test the UK’s defence resilience.
Britain has been fighting an unconventional war with Russia for at least a year and is not yet doing enough to prevent that confrontation becoming a conventional one, Labour MP Graeme Downie has warned.
Speaking at the ADS Skills Conference, the MP for Dunfermline and Dollar argued that the country’s ability to deter Russia ultimately depends not simply on weapons and equipment, but on whether Britain has enough skilled people to build, maintain and operate them. Downie said Scotland’s position at the gateway to the North Atlantic and the High North demonstrated the scale of the challenge.
He said: “It shows why the UK has been in an unconventional war with Russia for at least the past 12 months and I don’t believe our government, society or economy is doing what it is necessary to prevent that becoming a conventional war.”
Downie pointed to pressure across a range of domains, citing Russian drone activity affecting NATO allies, attacks around the Ukrainian and Polish border, the foiled attack on Leipzig airport, threats to subsea infrastructure and disruption affecting parts of Germany’s energy network. His wider argument was that responding to those threats requires industrial depth as much as military hardware, particularly the ability to replace equipment, sustain production and maintain forces during a prolonged crisis.
He said: “Vladimir Putin must see a resolute, informed and resilient British population. A strong, skilled, innovative population that they do not want to challenge.”
Downie added: “If armies win battles and economies win wars then our workforce secures peace. Our deterrence is our people.”
He spoke on shipbuilding in his own constituency as an example of the pressure facing the defence industrial workforce. Downie said: “Three hundred. That is how many welders Babcock was forced to recruit from the Philippines to work on the construction of the new frigates just down the road at Rosyth. That should be a national embarrassment.”
He acknowledged that overseas recruitment had provided a practical solution which allowed work to continue, but questioned why Britain was not producing enough workers domestically for those roles. He said: “These are highly skilled jobs. They are well-paid jobs. But why are we not producing enough of the people to do those jobs ourselves?”
ADS has told the Scottish Affairs Committee recently that it is monitoring around 10,000 live engineering vacancies across Scotland, with shortages spanning welding, fabrication, steelworking, plating and electrical, mechanical and systems engineering.
Downie also rejected arguments that higher defence spending should be funded by cutting welfare, saying national resilience depended on the strength of society as a whole. He said: “I have heard glib suggestions that cutting welfare is the route to security. Give people less so our armed forces can have more stuff. I utterly reject that. Because deterrence is not about stuff.”
He added: “You do not improve your deterrence by taking food out of the mouths of children.”
The MP also directed criticism towards the division of responsibilities between Westminster and Holyrood. Defence policy is reserved to the UK Government, while skills and economic development are devolved. Downie described the argument that defence was therefore someone else’s responsibility as “technically true. It is strategically inadequate.”
He also referred to plans for two Defence Technical Excellence Colleges in Scotland, saying they “need to be created right away”. Industry itself, he argued, also had to take more responsibility for fixing the skills shortages it regularly identifies.
With only around one in six Scottish employers offering apprenticeships in 2024, Downie challenged companies complaining about recruitment difficulties to explain what they were doing to create the workforce they required. He asked: “What are you doing to create the skilled people you need?”
Downie added: “Employers need to be part of the education system, not simply consumers of its output.”
He closed by returning to the central warning of his speech, arguing that building skills and industrial capacity should itself be treated as part of national deterrence. Downie said: “We are in an unconventional war with Russia and we must do everything to make sure that doesn’t become a conventional war that could cost hundreds, thousands, millions of lives.”
He added: “We must deter that and our deterrence is our people.”
“What are you doing to create the skilled people you need?”
I could not agree more about this point. The number of times I’m heard employers complaining that there aren’t enough skilled people in the workforce for them to hire, or mourning the state of young people when they come out of university. Yet I’ve also seen job adverts for bus drivers that needed a degree, entry level jobs that required 5 years experience in the underlying technology, and almost no companies I’ve worked for this century had a proper training programme.
So more apprenticeships please, and more courses to keep skilled people up to date in their crafts. If I were in government, I would allow spend on that to appear as an asset on the books, depreciating over five years and going if the employee left.
Or more and more companies offshoring critical work in cyber and IT to India because no one has the ‘required skillset’ in the UK….so fund IT & cyber apprenticeships!
Pure meaningless drivel from a Labour MP – if you are not going to fund defence properly then it’s extremely likely the U.K. will lose a war with a near peer adversary.
Labour have continued to massively underfund and cut British military assets since taking office – they are investing in swamping the nation with illegal migrants – Labour are outright lying about the state of the Royal Navy – Royal Air Force and British Army and if the U.K. ends up in a confrontation with Russia the British people will suffer because Putin will hit our vital infrastructure which is currently unprotected for the most part – we have virtually no missile defence.
The Royal Navy isn’t fit for purpose it’s been horrendously cut – the British Army is way to small and under equipped and the Royal Air Force needs to massively increase it’s capabilities too.
All this bollocks yet Al Carns who resigned with Heally has mysteriously been absent from making any comments or criticism! Does he now agree with the way we are going nowhere?