Resilience and Security in an Independent Scotland

Two reports released on Monday morning underlined the perilous state of resilience and security in the UK at the fag end of a Tory Government in power since 2010, one of which UK Defence Journal readers will probably feel comfortable discussing, the other maybe not so much.

The first is the NAO’s report into the MoD Equipment Plan until 2033, which it concluded, simply but devastatingly, was ‘unaffordable’, with an estimated shortfall of £16.8 billion, or 6% of the budget.

While this was of no real surprise to anyone who reads the UK Defence Journal, the fact that “this is the largest deficit in the Plan since the MoD first published it in 2012” was.

Written by Martin Docherty-Hughes MP, Member of Parliament for West Dunbartonshire since 2015 and SNP Defence Spokesperson since 2023, this article is part of our series exploring diverse perspectives on defence and security issues. While the opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the stance of the UK Defence Journal, we believe in the importance of presenting a variety of viewpoints. Understanding different perspectives is essential for a comprehensive grasp of complex subjects. For more articles in this series, please click here.

More devastating, especially for Ben Wallace’s legacy, was the idea that “The Plan does not reflect all the cost pressures to develop new and support existing capabilities set out in the 2021 Integrated Review and Defence Command Paper, which were broadly endorsed in the 2023 refresh of these“, and the looming threat of drastic cuts deferred until the 2024 Spending Review. 

The second report which sums up where the UK finds itself came from the Resolution Foundation. Titled ‘Stagnation Nation‘ it laid out how a “toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was straining the living standards of low- and middle-income Britain well before the cost of living crisis struck“.

There was an equally devastating central critique of the UK’s economic policy over a long period, with a now significant divergence from the rest of Northern Europe in our living standards, leaving middle earners an incredible 20% poorer than their peers in Germany. Britain has yet to get to grips with the fact that it is no longer a wealthy country by most normal measures, and the obvious corallies for government spending.

This is the heart of our arguments as to why Scotland should be an independent state, but it is also where a key point about the way that it would be defended begins. Not only because the people who serve in our armed forces are to be drawn from this society that is seeing its living standards fall, but because ensuring our defence budget does not run out of control is essential to the ongoing faith in our democratic system and the rule of law. 

It is therefore important to emphasise how we wish to see an independent Scotland where security is understood to begin at home, in our families and communities: a broad and human approach to a term which so often in the UK context has come to mean something discrete and remote from the concerns of the people who are to be protected.  

The foundation of a resilient and secure Scotland will be a well-funded public realm which delivers services to improve the lives of its citizens: paid for through an economy which provides good, well-paid jobs and secure accommodation. This is certainly utopian, and may appear on one level to be simplistic, but not only has the UK entirely failed in this regard, as the Resolution Foundation report demonstrates, our close neighbours in Northern Europe are performing demonstrably better.

It’s an aspect of UK security that has been overlooked for too long: I don’t think for example that my own constituency would have voted for Independence in 2014 had the UK Government sought to address the long legacy of industrial, economic and then social decline in the post war period, and an problem the government has explicitly acknowledged, if not really sought to tackle, with policies around ‘levelling up’.

It was a reality that came crashing home as well during the pandemic: I often watched on in bemusement as my fellow members of the Defence Select Committee sought to find military solutions to Covid: but how would it ever be the case that a centralised and hierarchical organisation be the most appropriate response to a crisis that requires a holistic, decentralised, all-of-society approach?

In the end of course, the armed force did play a vital – if bespoke – role, be it building temporary hospitals and providing vital airlift capability for those in remote communities. But on an operational level, it is not simply the case that the army can pivot away from kinetic operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East into building temporary camps for migrants, as former Home Secretary Suella Braverman suggested in the Commons this week.

In this context, where both these operational and broader strategic aims of the UK armed forces are so out of whack, an out-of-control defence budget, as evidenced by the NAO report, is of genuine concern for society at large. For too long, defence has been kept – literally and figuratively – behind barbed wire, out of sight from a general public and ready to retreat further behind acronyms and jargon. But as the fifth largest budget of any Government department on Whitehall, its success or failure is of genuine public interest. 

Quite simply, the way that defence budgets and policy are set in the UK is not commensurate with the working of a modern parliamentary democracy. If, as expected, the Labour Party wins the next General Election, my counterpart John Healey and his team will enter Main Building with no greater insight into the organisation’s finances than me or the average UK Defence Journal reader. Unlike countries like the US, MPs – including members of the Defence Select Committee – receive no special clearance or status to review MoD budgets, a fact often exploited by civil servants or Command in front of committee looking to wriggle out of testing questions. 

The result is the content chopping & changing (or as someone from Main Building might say ‘reprofiling the cost envelope’)  to suit the whims of individual Secretaries of State, which we know from repeated pleas from NAO reports past leads only to drive up the prices of programmes and cause uncertainty for industry. In turn, this creates a constant downward pressure on operational areas of the budget – otherwise known as wages and conditions.

The SNP has long advocated for the implementation of Multi Year Defence Agreements (MYDAs), which seek to bring together all parties in parliament to work towards a durable and sustainable funding package, usually over a five year period. This would ensure robust and open dialogue between MPs, and take away the temptations so often seen from the occupants of high Ministerial office to place their own career advancement ahead of the national interest: it can surely be no great surprise that the two longest-serving Defence Secretaries of the Tory years – Fallon and Wallace – leave office with such a perilous financial legacy.

In further articles that I look forward to writing for the UK Defence Journal – and I hope you will enjoy reading – I hope to go into some more of these topics in a little more detail, but I hope this has been a good introduction to where our ideas of security and resilience will be starting from. There will be no independence worth defending if it does not make our people wealthier, healthier and happier – and no true security that does not address the social and economic realities of our communities. 

You can read the rest of the articles in this series when they launch by clicking here.

Scotland’s Defence: Perspectives and Possibilities