When the Scottish Trade Union Peace Network gathered on June 18 to launch the Alternative Defence Review (ADR), which will be echoed on Wednesday (July 2) with its UK launch in Westminster, they weren’t just critiquing the UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR). They were challenging the assumption that military spending is the engine of both security and economic wellbeing.

The SDR positions defence expansion as a response to global threats, with stated plans to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, and ambitions to raise this further to 3% in the next Parliament. Since then, at the recent Nato summit, the UK Government committed to a new target of 5% per cent of GDP, putting national defence spending at greater amounts than at any time since the outbreak of the Second World War. The Government narrative suggests this investment will safeguard Britain and deliver economic dividends. But in Scotland – as elsewhere – this assumption demands urgent scrutiny. Shifting the UK to a wartime economy will have enormous negative impacts on society, the environment and the economy.

The SDR implies that bolstering the UK's nuclear capabilities will bring job growth and prosperity to Scotland, including through investment at Faslane. Yet history tells us otherwise. Defence jobs are precarious, vulnerable to political shifts and budgetary overruns. The delayed Astute-class submarine fleet is a case in point: its costs rose from £4.3bn to over £11bn. Analysis for the

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