Dave Doogan: I am an operative charged with delivering Scotland’s independence

While his former party leader was cosplaying as deputy prime minister, strategising nuclear war with Russia for a television reality show, Dave Doogan, the MP for Angus and Perthshire Glens, was sitting on his own secret defence plan for an independent Scotland – for real.

Defence of the realm and the SNP haven’t always been comfortable bedfellows – think back to bitter conference floor arguments over membership of Nato or limited reaction to a news agenda, and what the party inevitably sees as Westminster’s mishandling of global events. And yes, of course, with the Trident nuclear submarines based in the Clyde, the nationalists have a great hulking physical reminder that the UK has, quite literally, parked its tanks on their fervently anti-nuclear lawn – much against their will.

And while that alone could be a salient argument for independence, too often security issues just become too hot to handle for the SNP, and with no natural fit with its more left-leaning social justice agenda it quickly retreats into putting off detailed debate around defence for another day.

Even in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, defence got scant mention and any real discussion was often reduced to a slogan of ‘bairns not bombs’ and a clamour to rid Scotland of Trident, while proposals around establishing a military force centered on peacekeeping and disaster relief.

People don’t expect nationalists to be literate in defence and security matters

The Scottish Government’s own website carries a less than muscular topline in reference to defence and national security that states that an independent Scotland would “focus on keeping people in Scotland safe, supporting human rights and helping other countries around the world”.

Despite this backdrop, Doogan is an unashamed and vocal supporter of the defence sector and, having worked for the MoD for over 20 years as a military engineer, he sees no contradiction in that position and his nationalist politics. Indeed, he accuses me of being one-dimensional when I ask how he marries his love of the MoD, which is such an integral part of the Union, and his quest for independence.

“You say that, but only by viewing these things in a one-dimensional way,” he chides. “It’s one-dimensional because it’s a view that presupposes that an independent Scotland will not have an apparatus with which it defends its interests at home and abroad, and we will.

“And I kind of almost relish this discussion because people down here [Westminster] don’t expect nationalists to be literate in defence and security matters. They don’t expect nationalists to hold their armed forces in high esteem. They don’t expect nationalists to be able to talk fluently about defence matters, and they’re surprised, I can see it in their faces, when I do talk about it and talk about it with enthusiasm and with a working knowledge.

“Yes, I accept that many in the party do find defence uncomfortable to talk about. That is true and there’s a reason for that, and that’s because traditionally, nationalists have extrapolated their position on nuclear across the whole of defence. But how can you honour our men and women in uniform if you don’t honour the industry that allows them to do what they’ve got to do, and honour the harsh reality that if everything else fails, all you’ve got left is lethality and if you’re not prepared to use that to defend your freedom, somebody will use it to take your freedom?”

If you want to be a member of Nato it’s not like a book club, you have to pony up

There’s something entirely refreshing about Doogan’s clear fervour on the issue given how sensitive his party can be on it, and I ask him whether it is something he freely debates with party colleagues. Again, he is typically forthright.

“Look, if I’m honest, we didn’t make a great play on defence during 2014 which I think was a mistake. You could equally argue that was because, in terms of the hierarchy of material issues at stake, defence was not that high up, and that’s true but I think we need to look at the entire spectrum because there could be 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 people in Scotland that voted to stay who actually wanted independence, who wanted to vote yes but voted no because they didn’t think we’d be properly defended. Now, that’s 10,000 out of, I can’t remember how many short we were, and it might only be 1,000 or 2,000, but we need to go after every vote the next time and so we need to think about our arguments around defence in the same way as any other issue that might have persuaded people to vote no.

“But to be clear, part of being strategic is picking your battles and am I on some messianic mission to convince everybody in the SNP about the importance of defence? No. It’s far more important that we form and maintain a cohesive and united front in pursuit of independence than get bogged down in the minutiae of a particular issue. And make no mistake, a lot of people would love us to get bogged down in the minutiae because it derails you, but we need that clarity of purpose, and we need it collectively to deliver on what it is we’re trying to do for Scotland.

“You mentioned that Nato debate, and I was there in Perth at conference for that and I thought it was a really good debate, actually, and yeah, some people were really unhappy, but that is just the reality of debate. The SNP, as a party, voted that an independent Scotland should be a member of Nato, and in my view it was categorically the right decision. But you need to join the dots. If you want to be a member of Nato it’s not like a book club, you have to pony up and demonstrate what your contribution will be to collective peace and security, not just Scotland’s peace and security. Of course, that will be a priority, but it’s very difficult in this modern world to secure your own peace and security without assisting in the security of your allies.”

But, I ask, can he convince naysayers that Scots would be as safe as an independent country as they are as part of the UK?

“One hundred per cent they would be. Scotland has a proud martial tradition. We have some of the most incredible defence manufacturers in Scotland. We are the part of these islands that builds the warships for the rest of these islands, and now for our allies in Canada and in Australia and in Poland and Indonesia, helping them to do that.

“So, we have the infrastructure and the wherewithal and actually, if you look at Scotland’s geographic position, we are central, literally, not metaphorically, central to the defence of the Euro-Atlantic region, and we will do that as an independent nation, working with our allies in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and England, because actually we’re here to be a positive force for good with our only land neighbour, working on the economy in a shared way, working on defence and intelligence in a shared way, and on regional issues in the same way.

“We’ll be self-defended, but it will be far better for us to do that in concert and cooperation with a respectful and respecting neighbour, rather than being told, ‘you get the nuclear submarines and we’ll put a squadron of Lightnings up there, and just keep the soldiers coming…’

“Defence has traditionally not been particularly favoured territory for the SNP, but don’t let’s lose sight of what John Swinney’s done since he’s become first minister. He’s done what the people of Scotland demanded, which was ensuring that nothing leaving Scotland was going to receive government support if it couldn’t be demonstrated that it wasn’t party to Israeli genocide in Palestine. That’s entirely consistent with the will of the Scottish people. But of course, we can’t introduce an arms embargo because that’s reserved to Westminster, who have refused to have a comprehensive arms embargo against Israel.

We have to get over some of the legacy issues whereby we’ve been ambivalent, at worst, about defence

“We are also substantially investing in our defence manufacturers. John Swinney has been absolutely clear that defence and security is central to Scotland now, and it will be central to an independent Scotland in the future as well. The Scottish Government and its agencies support defence manufacturing in Scotland, and our veterans in Scotland have a better deal than veterans anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Our covenant is more robust and wide than the one that exists elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

“So we’ve got everything we need, more or less in the right place, to say that an SNP Scottish Government has esteem for defence. It represents, it respects and invests in our defence manufacturers. It respects and supports our service personnel, both active and veterans. So, defence is solid ground. It’s just we have to get over some of the legacy issues whereby we’ve been ambivalent, at worst, about defence, and that needs to end.

“But work has gone on and I’ve got a comprehensive overview of what defence in an independent Scotland will look like, what those services will be, what equipment would be required, the personnel needed, and so on…”

Hold on, you have a secret defence plan?

“Yeah, and there will be a time and a place to release that to people and that will be when there’s an audience that is willing to receive it.”

This is a fascinating revelation from Doogan – that not only does he go on to tell me that he harbours a desire to be the defence secretary in an independent Scotland, but that he has a defence plan sitting ready and waiting to be published once defence can become a subject more palatable to the membership and beyond to properly debate. I ask him who in the party has seen his secret plan.

“A number of people have reviewed it. And we’ve made some changes to it. And actually, I’ve not looked at it, much less done anything to it, for a couple of years now so it’ll need a comprehensive rewrite because a lot has changed in the world so it’ll need a thorough refresh, but the basics are there. And to be honest, there’s a whole heap of other things that were never touched on in 2014 or that we need to absolutely get razor sharp for the next time, because I’m 53 and I can’t wait around forever.”

To understand Doogan’s passions, you need to understand his roots. He was born in Perth in 1973. The youngest of six children born to parents Jim and Anne, who were both first-generation economic migrants from Donegal – his father from the coast and his mother from further inland. And it is their story, as impoverished Irish Catholics, who grafted hard and overcame some prejudice to build a very comfortable and secure childhood in Perthshire for Doogan and his siblings, that has clearly shaped who he is and what he stands for.

“I would say that my father’s family wasn’t really in dire straits, they were just generic Irish poor. They were subsistence level. For my mum’s family, it was a wee bit harder. It was real poverty that they experienced, but they were tremendously dignified and industrious. And what do you do when there’s no work at home? You go and find work abroad. The same old story.

“And why did my mother’s family end up in Forfar – actually on the West High Street where my office is now – I don’t know, and I’ll never know, but I would imagine they knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew somebody who was in Forfar and there was work there, so they were told ‘if you get to Forfar, I’ll get you a start’. It would be something of that nature.”

Conversely, his father left school at 14 and came to Scotland at 15 to work the land in agriculture, drainage and construction and during the war, he spent time working at Biggin Hill constructing the new runway which became a key RAF location in the Battle of Britain. Many of his fellow countrymen went back home to Ireland at that time, but he stayed because of the shortage of labour and the opportunity to work. And having made enough money, he returned to East Donegal after the war to buy a farm. However, the farms were all owned by Protestants at the time and he found his offer to buy was repeatedly refused despite him increasing it.

Having eventually worked out what was going on, Doogan’s father got a lawyer from Ayrshire to submit an offer on his behalf which was then accepted. And although, sadly, illness forced him to sell up within a couple of years, he returned to Perth where he married Doogan’s mother – he was 40 by this time and his new wife 30.

I ask Doogan what kind of effect that early discrimination had had on his father.

“He was a really stoic character and he was pretty, I wouldn’t say worldly, but certainly worldly in the context of Irish domestic politics. He was born in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland prior to partition, so he knew all about it. However, as I said in my maiden speech, my dad was a pragmatist, and he spoke to the laird and the labourer in the same way. He didn’t care if you were an Ulster Scot or a Protestant farmer, he was just another man that understood agriculture. So he approached buying the farm on that basis but then saw, very quickly, and he didn’t need anybody to write it down for him, he knew what was happening and he worked around it.”

I was just having a good time and I wasn’t particularly present in terms of the education

This leads us to one of the other many layers of identity of Dave Doogan – his Catholicism, which he wears relatively lightly but is as integral to who he is as his Irish roots and his Scottish identity. And he says that while Irish migrants like his parents didn’t always get a “full-throated welcome” when they landed in Perthshire, that was more to do with them pushing wages down rather than from any sectarian point of view.

And while Doogan does talk about his own education at a Catholic school in Perth suffering from less emphasis on academic achievement than their Protestant counterparts, which does hint at the way the religious divide in education saw friends going to different schools in the town, he says sectarianism was not something he encountered.

He says that for his parents, education was important but “important in the abstract”.

“My mum and dad were very seized of the view that they had no formal education opportunities, and that we should have every formal education opportunity. But there wasn’t a great deal expected of you at my secondary school, St Columba’s. Academia was not really in the ethos there, I think. It’s only my perception so there’s no right or wrong to it, but if you were a boy you were expected to pretty much get out at 16 and go and get a job, and actually it was fine because these were happier times and if you left school at 16, you did get a job.

I wasn’t going to college; I wasn’t going to university. I wanted to be an electrician but was railroaded into the MoD

“But I used to say, mum and dad had six kids – two of them got degrees and the other four of us went to St Columba’s. My eldest sister Bridget went to [private girls’ school] Kilgraston and became a teacher. Next after her, Seamus went to Perth High and became a civil engineer. Joe went off to be a welder at Edwards Engineering. My sister Anne went off to work in retail. My brother Chick (Charles) went to drive JCBs, and I went to the MoD. Now Joe went off to be a welder at Edwards Engineering, and then went to Rosyth Royal Dockyard, then went to Alexander’s Bus Manufacturers and now he’s back at Babcock in Rosyth with an MBA under his belt.

“I just wasn’t very focused at school. I had a very vibrant sweepstake operation which I was told I couldn’t do after it got very successful. It didn’t last very long, but I think I learned the importance of having a vision and planning with that small enterprise. But basically, I was just having a good time and I wasn’t particularly present in terms of the education. I wasn’t a truant; I went to school. I quite liked school and I remember hanging around with the year above a lot because they had common rooms, and then I genuinely remember sitting looking at exam papers, thinking ‘I’ve just got no clue, no clue’.

“I was popular enough with the teachers as well as the other kids and I was never a troublemaker. I just wasn’t there. I had no focus at all. I was always focused on being out working with my dad, or building go-carts or treehouses, or playing football, or being in Donegal, or basically anywhere other than school. I had no illusions. I wasn’t going to college; I wasn’t going to university. I wanted to be an electrician but was railroaded into the MoD by a well-meaning person, and I’m actually very glad that they did.”

What followed was a successful 20-year career with the MoD as a military engineer and Doogan talks in glowing terms about his time there and the training he received, but says he always felt slightly inferior because he had no degree.

“It’s true, but much of it was born of the fact that the part of the MoD I was in was undergoing a lot of change, and whenever the government wants to introduce change they bring in consultants who ask you what you want to do, ask you how you would do it, and then present it back to you in a shiny folder. I used to watch these young men, who were my age or slightly younger, strutting around like kings of the world, and I’m thinking ‘the only difference between you and me is I know what we’re doing here, and you’ve got a degree’. So I thought, well, I better get a degree because by this stage it was all turning a bit sour, you were just waiting for people to die to get a promotion opportunity.

I was very seized of the fact that I didn’t want my kids’ standard of living to drop because I had trotted off to university

“I could have moved down south into the MoD – everything we did at Almondbank, they were doing down at Fleetlands in Gosport or down in Portsmouth and Cornwall. But all my family was in the area here and I was married with two small kids. My wife had a better job than me, still does, always has. And I thought, ‘why would I uproot you all?’”

In 2007, Doogan took the opportunity of redundancy and, at 34, started a degree at the University of Dundee studying international relations and politics. Unbeknown to him at the time, a young Stephen Flynn was in the year above him.

“When I started university I had the most acute imposter syndrome because I left school with an O-grade in arithmetic to my name, but thankfully, the MoD, being a good employer, had put me through my ONC in engineering, which I failed by the way because I didn’t quite manage to have my head screwed on properly. But I stuck in and got my HNC, which I thought was an utterly useless qualification but turned out it was the key I needed to unlock a door at university. But I remember at the time refusing point blank to do it because I was a senior manager at Almondbank by this stage. I had about 60 staff between commercial and operational engineers, and they said, ‘well, you’ll need to do [it], because you haven’t got any Highers, you need to do an access course’. I was like, ‘I am a man in a hurry, I am not doing an access course’, but thankfully I did.

“I approached university as a job. I had two small children, dropped them off at school, and went in whether I had lectures or tutorials or not. I would sit in the library and read and bash out essays, and I didn’t know you could get a first or a second or a third. I just thought you got a degree. I had no clue. And when I found out you could get a first, I said, ‘I’m getting a first’ and that’s what I worked to get and did.

I joined the SNP in 2006, left the MoD in 2007 and that was to become an MP. I told very few people that

“Redundancy means different things to different people. I wanted to be made redundant. I wanted out, and I wanted a payoff. We could have existed without me working because, as I say, my wife has a good job and she did at that time too, but I was very seized of the fact that I didn’t want my kids’ standard of living to drop because I had trotted off to university halfway through their childhood, so I drove taxis on a Friday and Saturday night for six years. It’s a very good apprenticeship for somebody who wants to represent the public and I knew then that that’s what I wanted to do.

“There’s a strange dynamic in a taxi. It’s a very intimate space, and you’re not looking at the person sitting behind you. Add in a little bit of alcohol to that and suddenly you’re getting it all, warts and all. Oh, and the fact that they think, usually wrongly, that they’ll never see you again, and that you don’t know who they are or you don’t know anyone they know, also wrongly. But I’m a staunch believer in what happens in the taxi stays in the taxi. But because it’s dark, I’ve had mortifying situations where you get the passenger to where they’re going and you put the light on for the paying bit, and they see who you are, and they’re like, ‘oh, sh…’ But driving taxis was really good and I did that all through university, and what an apprenticeship it was for going into politics.”

Doogan worked as a case worker for the then finance secretary, John Swinney, from 2011 to 2016 and was elected to Perth and Kinross Council in 2012 before his election as an MP in 2019. I ask him if this was all part of the plan.

“Yeah, I joined the SNP in 2006, left the MoD in 2007 and that was to become an MP. I told very few people that. And anyone who I did tell, apart from my wife, thought it was a joke. You can’t choose to be an MP. You can try to be an MP but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. The world is full of people who didn’t make it and would have been excellent MPs. And the parliament is also full of people who really probably should have gone and done something else because they’re not the best MPs in the world.

“But that was the plan. Why? Because when I worked in the MoD, every two years, without fail, they would try and shut us down. Some pencil pusher would ask what this place up in the Highlands of Scotland was – which is where they think Perth is by the way – that consumes so much money and only has 400 people working at it? And they would think they could make a great saving by closing us down. And then only at the 11th hour did they actually see what we did. And some grown-up would say, ‘you can’t close Almondbank’.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say no Almondbank, no helicopters in the MoD. That was what we did. We were small, we were discreet, we were extraordinary value for money, but that still didn’t stop them trying to shut us down almost on an annual basis. And I thought then, although I didn’t know the word ‘invidious’ at the time, what an invidious way, a shit way, to live your life, where you just want to come to work and do a half decent job but every second Christmas you think you’re getting put out of work again. And so I thought I could go on like this, go up all these levels to get to be a grade five or a grade six civil servant, having schlepped all-round the UK with different jobs because mobility is twice as important as ability in the MoD, and I could eventually get up to the decision-making level, or I could take a step off and try and get up the political route and influence things from there. And I’ve never lost sight of that ambition.

“When I stood on the floor of the House of Commons as the SNP’s defence spokesperson, taking Ben Wallace – the then defence secretary – to account, it was a pinch yourself moment because that plan to step off the civil service train and get onto the political platform so that I could hold the decision makers to account was so unlikely.

“I wouldn’t like to put odds on it, but it would be maybe 100,000/1 that you would make it, and I made it through a series of episodes of hard work, determination, good fortune, good people and a great family and I don’t forget any of that or where I have come from – or where I want us to get to.”