Alex Gallagher‘s Bylines Scotland article, ‘Too wee, too poor is a nationalist red herring’, (18 March 2026) poses some challenging questions for the proponents of an independent Scotland. My article, ‘Defence for an independent Scotland’ (21 March 2026), considered the points he made on defence. He responded in turn with his article, ‘Defence for an Independent Scotland (not)’, which focuses on five key questions.
I spent a lot of time in the defence industry, and two and a half years in a senior civil service post in the MOD, and have learnt that there are other questions to be asked and answered first.
The defence proposals put forward by the SNP Governments in Scotland’s Future (2013) and An Independent Scotland’s Place in the World (2025), have not stood the test of time. Nor has the UK’s defence planning of the 2010s, and later. Assumptions that made sense a few years ago have been overturned by the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran, and by Donald Trump’s tilt towards Russia.
In 2020, my co-authors and I set out a couple of pages of defence commentary in our book, Scotland 2070: Healthy|Wealthy|Wise. This commentary has stood the test of time, is in no way contradicted by the Ukraine and Iran wars, and formed the basis of my first article. As a ‘freelancer’ with relevant expertise, I offer these points for consideration by those who are interested in the defence of a hypothetical future independent Scotland.
Schrödinger’s Scotland
The unionist position on defence regarding an independent Scotland, and on independence generally, is undermined by the incompatible assumptions behind the two questions:
- That the Scottish Government has [an] income and expenditure gap, meaning that if independent, there would have to be cuts; so how could it afford to defend itself?
- How can it possibly make sense to weaken the UK military, and therefore NATO, in the current international chaos, [by Scotland becoming independent]?
The first question suggests that an independent Scotland would be too poor to defend itself.
The second implies that Scotland is so wealthy that England cannot afford for it to leave, and the UK would be dangerously weakened if it did.
So we have Schrödinger’s Scotland: a country that is simultaneously too poor to be independent, and so rich that England can’t afford to let us go.
These cannot both be true simultaneously. So which is it?
If Scotland is too poor to defend itself, it must be an intolerable drain on England’s resources. Scotland’s departure would strengthen England, leaving it better able to defend itself, and with a smaller perimeter to defend.
Towards more realistic financial assumptions
Since Westminster is not rushing to eject Scotland from the UK, we can assume that Scotland’s recorded income/expenditure mismatch doesn’t tell the whole story.
The recent article by Roy et al (2026) sets out 70 years of Scotland’s national accounts. It shows that Scotland has been a net contributor to the UK budget throughout the period analysed (1948-2018). When the smoke has cleared after independence negotiations are complete, we can assume that Scotland would prove to be a normal, small European country, with adequate resources to defend itself.
Scotland’s annual GDP is around £200bn. A defence budget around 2.5% of GDP should be affordable, as long as most of it is spent in the domestic economy, and would provide the military with an annual budget of £5bn.
For comparison, the SNP proposed an annual defence budget of £2.5bn in 2013 and 2% of GDP in 2025. The UK’s current defence budget is 2.4% of GDP (Scotland pays its share of this), and is intended to rise towards the NATO goal of 5% for defence, security and resilience. If an independent Scotland were to aspire to reach this level, the national resilience element should be prioritised. The actual amount of the defence budget matters less than how wisely it is spent.
The real question is not ‘can we afford it?’ but ‘can we do it?’ As economist John Maynard Keynes said, “anything we can actually do we can afford”. This is true for any country that issues its own currency. My previous article showed that “we can actually do it” – Scotland does, broadly speaking, have the necessary resources and skills. However, an independent Scotland would be much better placed to play, and pay for, its full part in Europe’s defence if it had its own sovereign currency, which is not currently an SNP priority.
Credible threats to an independent Scotland
If Aleksandr Dugin’s 1999 treatise on geopolitics accurately articulates the Russian ‘threat’, the goal would be to restore Russia’s control or influence to the borders of the old Russian empire, and weaken or dismantle NATO, so that Russia doesn’t feel threatened. This is an existential threat to Eastern and Central European countries, but not to the British Isles.
As I discussed in my previous article, a Russian land invasion of Scotland is inconceivable. Russia would, however, pose hybrid threats to our maritime assets and critical national infrastructure, as might other nations and non-state actors; and we would be vulnerable to financial and information operations, designed to corrupt our democracy and separate us from our allies and partners. This analysis is borne out by recent podcasts by Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell on The Rest is Politics (31 March 2026), and General Sir Patrick Sanders on the FourCast podcast (1 April 2026).
The very recently published Rycroft Review stresses that we now need to add the US to the list of countries seeking to destabilise UK and European politics and society, an intention clearly and blatantly set out in the US’s recently published National Security Strategy.
The only countries that have invaded Scotland in the last thousand years are England and Norway, and it’s a reasonable assumption that, as neighbours and allies, neither would wish to do so in the foreseeable future. The US Navy did threaten Scotland’s shores in the American War of Independence, captained by a Scot, to add insult to injury…
This concludes part one, in which we:
- challenged the paradox of Schrödinger’s Scotland;
- suggested that once Scotland’s National Accounts are properly understood and separated from the UK’s, an independent Scotland should be able to afford a defence budget of 2.5% of GDP, as long as the bulk of this is spent in the domestic economy;
- considered the credible military and hybrid threats to an independent Scotland.
Part two will look at:
- how well the UK can defend Scotland at the moment;
- the alliance landscape now and in the future;
- some numbers for the big-ticket equipment items that might be afforded;
- the implications of learning from the Ukraine War for a putative land component of the Scottish Defence force.
Finally we will challenge all parties, as the Holyrood election approaches, to update their thinking on defence issues, both for Scotland staying in the UK, and becoming independent.
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