Douglas Alexander, the Secretary of State for Scotland, has signalled a push for Scottish yards to win the Navy’s new hybrid warships and called for Scotland to get an outsized share of defence spending, in a wide-ranging interview with the UK Defence Journal on board a British carrier.
Sitting in a room below the hangar of HMS Prince of Wales, one of Britain’s two most powerful warships, Alexander ranged across shipbuilding, skills, spending and the threats facing Scotland, having only just arrived in Oslo as one of six UK ministers at the Atlantic Future Forum.
The carrier was built at Rosyth and has spent recent months leading a strike group in the High North, and Alexander said he was immensely proud as Scottish Secretary to be on board. The forum, he explained, brings together defence ministers, military chiefs and industry to discuss both security and “the industrial base that supports our security”, at a time of growing understanding of “the need for economic security to underpin national security”.
That was why he had made the trip alongside Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General, and Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, “beating the drum and making the case for Scotland’s defense industrial base.”
Pressed on whether he wants the Common Combat Vessels, the command ships for the Royal Navy’s hybrid fleet promised in the Defence Investment Plan, built at Rosyth or elsewhere in Scotland, Alexander was quick to vouch for the Fife yard’s appetite: “Well, you can be assured that Babcocks are pushing hard.” Babcock, he explained, sees its Arrowhead design as the answer to developing that hybrid capability.
Alexander, who was last at Rosyth the week before last, described a yard eager for the next job: “I talk regularly to Babcock’s leadership and indeed to the workforce at the yard, and I’m conscious that they are ambitious for the future and looking for new orders.” He was careful to acknowledge the rules of the game, adding: “Clearly, there is a procurement process that needs to be followed, and I tend to find that advocacy on Scotland’s behalf is most effectively done in private rather than on the airwaves.”
The minister set out the scale of what is already at stake: “So the MOD supports about 26,300 jobs in Scotland, including 12,200 directly in industry, and the MOD spends about 2.1 billion pounds a year in Scotland, so Scotland is safer and stronger as part of the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom is safer and stronger with Scotland at the heart of its defenses.”
Defence spending, the minister noted, was about 2.4 per cent of GDP when Labour took office in July 2024 and is heading towards NATO’s 3.5 per cent target by 2035, with more detail due in the spending review in the coming months. The government, he insisted, has already shown its intent: “but we’ve already evidenced by our actions as well as by our words our commitment to strengthen our defenses.” For Scotland, Alexander made the point that the gains should follow: “And as surely as we strengthen our defenses, there is a defense dividend for Scotland.”
Asked what burden sharing across Europe means for Scottish industry in practice, ahead of his appearance on a forum panel on a stronger Europe and a stronger NATO on Thursday, he set his sights high: “I want to see Scotland win an outsized share of the defense spending that inevitably will be rising, both because of the commitment we’ve made as a government and because of that changing threat environment.”
Norway’s decision to buy Type 26 frigates from the Clyde was, in his telling, proof of what Scottish yards can win when industry, navies and governments pull together: “Norway didn’t choose the Clyde by chance. The work that BAE Systems was doing industrially was competitive and important. So too was the navy to navy relationship between the Royal Navy and the Norwegian Navy, and so too was the strategic alliance between the United Kingdom government and the Norway government.”
The relationship, as he put it, runs deep: “So whether it is industrially, whether it is diplomatically, or whether it is in terms of interoperability, we have a deep and enduring partnership with Norway as fellow members of NATO”.
Alexander explained that his attachment to the yards is personal and runs back through his family: “I care deeply about this. Not only did my grandfather work as an engineer in the Clyde”. He recalled that one of his earliest campaigns was to save the Kvaerner Govan shipyard when it faced closure in 1998 and 1999, and reflected that had anyone told him then that, as Scottish Secretary, he would see a £10 billion order guaranteeing work for 2,000 Scottish employees through the 2030s, “I would have bitten your hand off”.
Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, told the forum that Norway is buying frigates with Britain and submarines with Germany so the platforms are the same product, and urged allies spending more to spend “smarter, more strategic, and more together.”
Vice Admiral Rune Andersen, chief of the Norwegian Joint Headquarters, said he is confident the frigate programme will be at the heart of the Lunna House agreement “and that we will end up with good ships in time.”
On Thursday, Wes Streeting and his Norwegian counterpart Tore O. Sandvik confirmed that Britain will buy three Norwegian standardised vessels as mine-hunting motherships as part of the Type 26 export agreement, which the MoD says supports more than 2,000 jobs at BAE Systems’ Glasgow shipyards.
Winning that work, Alexander argued, must also mean Scots gaining the skills to do it, and he drew a lesson from the ship beneath his feet. While he voiced pride in the work done on them, he acknowledged that industry failed to secure the training and skills their construction offered.
The Minister was clear that the coming wave of orders must leave more behind in Scotland: “I’m determined that we secure not just work for Scottish Yards, but that local people in Scotland benefit directly from that work.” He wants to see welders trained in Glasgow, and credited John Healey, who as Defence Secretary committed to funding the welding centre on the Clyde.
Scotland’s defence industry, in Alexander’s view, already spans shipbuilding, advanced radar, satellites and space, and the next phase has to bring its people with it.
With the Scottish Government now matching the UK government’s £10 million, seven months after he and Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, challenged it to in March, Scotland will get two Defence Technical Excellence Colleges serving the defence clusters in the east and west. He cast that as “the start of the next chapter of Scotland’s defense industrial story”, before setting out the ambition behind it: “So whether it is in welding, whether it is in electrical engineering, whether it is across the full range of skills that Scottish industry needs, we need a better job being done in Scotland in training the young people of Scotland for the jobs of tomorrow, and that’s what a UK government that I’m part of is determined to deliver.”
The UK Defence Journal also asked Alexander how vulnerable British society is to outside interference, after pro-independence bot accounts on X fell silent during strikes on Iran, and whether the government should do more to strengthen resilience. Stressing that ministers take the threat very seriously, he took issue with the language used to describe it, calling the attacks “state-sponsored acts of terrorism, hybrid somehow does a disservice to the nature of the threat.”
He praised Britain’s cyber defenders and hinted at more to come on resilience: “But we are proud and grateful for the work of our cyber capabilities, the National Cyber Security Center, and others. We are resolute in our determination to meet and match the changing threats that we face, and there’s been a strong focus in recent weeks on the challenge of also building up our resilience as a country. And the defense secretary has said a lot about that in recent days, and I expect we’ll see more in the days to come.”
Rutte told the forum on Wednesday that Britain’s Budget commitments mean it will double its defence spending in ten years, and the UK Defence Journal has reported warnings that Scotland risks missing out on the defence spending boost and that Scotland would get only one defence college without match funding.
The Royal Navy wants six Common Combat Vessels by 2035 but has yet to settle on a design, and the UK Defence Journal has reported that the new hybrid warship could be built at Rosyth, where Babcock is building the Type 31 frigates based on its Arrowhead 140 design. Norway picked the Type 26 as its next frigate and agreed the £10 billion purchase in December 2025.
