Holyrood Joins the UK War Book as Scotland Becomes the Target

A Scottish Government official confirmed on 8 October that Holyrood will help write a new UK War Book for the first time. Military chiefs in the same Edinburgh room put a large conflict on a clock that runs to 2030.

The meeting was not a tour of Faslane. It was about who shuts schools, keeps island clinics online, and guards the cables that already interest Russian survey ships off Scotland.

An Edinburgh Room Full of Uncomfortable Maps

Military leaders, civil servants, analysts, academics and industry bosses met in central Edinburgh on 8 October, hosted by The D Group and the British Foreign Policy Group. Some of the session ran under Chatham House rules. The aim, as the organisers set it, was to map Scotland’s weight in UK national security and to see how Holyrood and Westminster would share a crisis that hits home, or a NATO ally, which would pull Britain in under collective defence.

Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s former defence spokesman and now a senior adviser on defence and security at Fenton Fitzwilliam in Dublin, opened on geography. Scotland sits across the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, the practical gateway for Russia’s Northern Fleet into the Atlantic, and British forces based in Scotland are the ones that watch it.

Scotland sits across the GIUK gap and we are critical to the UK’s ability to watch and defend it.

Stewart McDonald, former SNP defence spokesman, Edinburgh conference, 8 October 2026

He said Scotland still understands that place “far better than it does,” and that the political attention has been thin since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. On 10 October, Kate Forbes, a senior SNP figure, wrote that the party can no longer afford to duck the defence debate, including military readiness and nuclear deterrence. The War Book work and that argument landed in the same week.

Holyrood Is Helping Write the UK War Book

Defence stays reserved. Health, transport, schools and much of the infrastructure that would fail in a war do not. That is why a senior Scottish Government civil servant told the conference, and later agreed the point could be public, that Holyrood will help shape the new book.

We will be working closely with the UK Government to influence and to inform the development of the War Book. We will be learning the lessons from the Covid pandemic, learning that having a plan understanding that governance, understanding those roles and responsibilities in advance of any sort of conflict is the right thing to do.

Senior Scottish Government civil servant, Edinburgh conference, 8 October 2026

The Cabinet Office in London leads the draft. It is the first time the Scottish Government has been brought into that work. The book is meant to be finished by the end of 2026. It is not the armed forces’ shooting plan. It is the civilian companion: how departments, and now devolved services, move from peace to war.

Professor Andrew Neal, personal chair of international security at Edinburgh University, tied the step to the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which asked the Cabinet Office to build protocols for civilian help to the military. Holyrood, he said, already sits inside UK-wide resilience and crisis response, so it would have to be inside any such plan.

Whitehall had already resurrected the War Book for home defence after the war in Ukraine returned the idea of a fight that reaches the UK mainland. Darren Jones, then chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, told Parliament on 14 July 2026 that the government was updating the book and lining up military and civilian effort if hostilities reach Britain. The Resilience Action Plan published in 2025 sits behind that push. A UK government spokesperson said people expect contingency plans for a range of scenarios, however unlikely.

HOW THE WAR BOOK CAME BACK

1. 1912: Prime Minister Asquith tells the Commons that a War Book now sets each department’s duties if war starts.
2. Cold War: Cabinet Office books spell out what ministers and local officials do before, during and in war, with nuclear attack as the main assumption.
3. 1990s: After the Soviet collapse the books are archived. By 2015 ministers say the old compendium is no longer held as one volume, and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 covers emergencies.
4. August 2024: A Home Defence Programme is set up to align military and civil effort if a crisis escalates.
5. July 2026: Ministers say the War Book is being rewritten, with Holyrood later confirmed as a partner, for completion by the end of 2026.
6. 2027: Exercise Albiston Shadow, described as the largest UK home defence exercise in several decades, is due to test the plans over several days with hundreds of officials.

Older editions, including a 1976 copy bound with string at the National Archives in Kew, ran to mobilising civilians and industry, shutting schools, clearing hospitals, rationing food and storing national treasures. The new version is classified. Households should not expect a public checklist from it.

Faslane, Lossiemouth and the Northern Lock

McDonald’s inventory started with the bases everyone already knows, then moved to the civilian kit that would be hit in any serious confrontation. The Ministry of Defence, in evidence to a Scottish Affairs Committee inquiry on the North Atlantic, put the same geography in official language: Scotland is the closest UK land mass to the High North, and Scotland is the UK’s Northern Flank.

WHAT SITS IN SCOTLAND

• The Clyde: The Royal Navy’s submarine service and the UK nuclear deterrent are based at Faslane and Coulport.
• Lossiemouth: Maritime patrol aircraft that watch the North Atlantic, and Typhoons that intercept Russian aircraft coming from the north, fly from RAF Lossiemouth.
• Prestwick: The airport, owned by the Scottish Government, matters to NATO, to the UK and to Ukraine far beyond its size, McDonald said.
• St Fergus: A large share of the gas that heats British homes comes ashore in Aberdeenshire.
• The cables: Subsea cables and interconnectors between Scotland, Ireland, the Northern Isles and the Faroes land on Scottish coasts, with North Sea platforms, new offshore wind and the onshore grid behind them.

Put the map and the inventory together, McDonald said, and the conclusion is blunt. Scotland is a forward edge of NATO’s northern flank, and a target for anyone who wants to weaken the alliance below the threshold of war. The independence argument still treats Faslane as the whole defence file. The conference treated Prestwick, St Fergus and the island cables as the parts Holyrood actually runs.

Cables and Islands Would Be Hit First

Professor Kristen Harkness, of the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, told the gathering that the sabotage of European undersea infrastructure is what should worry Scotland most. Because the country sits close to waters where Russia has already gone after cables off Norway and in the Baltic, she said Scotland could be a “target of ease.”

Island communities, she added, live on those links. Telecommunications, power and internet all run under the sea. Health and education are delivered remotely in those communities more often than on the mainland, so a cut is not an inconvenience. It is a clinic and a school going dark. Communities, particularly on islands, may need to be ready to go for a period with power or internet gone.

That is the below-threshold fight. In November 2025, Defence Secretary John Healey said the Russian spy ship Yantar was on the edge of UK waters north of Scotland, mapping undersea cables, and that its crew had directed lasers at RAF pilots tracking it. A Royal Navy frigate and RAF P-8 aircraft had been sent to follow the ship. It was the second time that year Yantar had come into UK waters. Healey said the ship belongs to a Russian fleet built to put undersea infrastructure at risk, driven by the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known as GUGI, for surveillance in peacetime and sabotage in a war.

“We see you. We know what you are doing. And if Yantar travels South this week, we are ready,” he said. The Ministry of Defence has also pointed to a 30% rise in Russian vessels threatening UK waters over two years. Healey used the same Downing Street session to list a wider pattern: Russian incursions into NATO airspace had doubled, and UK Defence had seen 90,000 cyber-attacks in a year.

What Sweden Posts Through Every Letterbox

McDonald’s remedy was not another Whitehall committee. It was the Nordic habit of talking to households as adults. Sweden has twice in the last decade posted every home a booklet, If Crisis or War Comes, on what people should do, what they should keep in the house, and what the state will expect in a crisis or a war. Norway does the same. Finland built its security model around the state, business and the citizen, and runs national defence courses that put leaders from every field through the same training.

Nobody in Stockholm, Oslo or Helsinki treats that as scaremongering, he said. They treat people as adults who can be told the truth and asked to prepare. The Scottish Government already runs most of the services people would turn to, so it is well placed to do the same: plain guidance, refreshed often, on what households should expect and keep at home, and a willingness to talk about conflict as well as floods, wildfires and pandemics.

HOUSEHOLD WAR ADVICE, SIDE BY SIDE

The classified book in London will not replace that letter. McDonald was asking Holyrood to do the public half of the job the Nordics already do, because the services people would need in a cable cut are already Scottish.

A String-Tied Typescript in Kew

The last full British version of this work was a Cold War machine. The country would have been split into regions, each run by a cabinet minister with wide powers, backed by senior officers, chief constables and judges. An Emergency Powers (Defence) Bill was assumed at the outset, on the 1939 model that let the state take almost any action needed to fight. That world was archived when the Soviet Union collapsed. For three decades the UK planned for floods, pandemics and terror, not for a return to general war.

Then Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in June 2026 that the intelligence assessment, shared with other NATO countries, was that Russia could attack the alliance as soon as 2030. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defence staff, has called this the most dangerous period of his 35-year career. In September he said Russia was probing and testing, with as much long-range aviation in 2026 as in 2025, plus cyber attacks, technology smuggling, and what he called reckless sabotage and assassination attempts. “Russia is definitely raising the stakes and risks crossing a line,” he said.

On 8 October, the same day as the Edinburgh meeting, Knighton said national resilience now has to involve civil society and the emergency services, and that Britain should look to European allies who have already built that habit. He was speaking in Wales about the Welsh Government’s role. The Edinburgh conference was the Scottish version of the same sentence.

The First Test Comes in 2027

THE CLOCK THE ROOM WAS USING

• End of 2026: The rewritten War Book is due, with Holyrood feeding the civilian chapters for the first time.
• 2027: Exercise Albiston Shadow is due to run the largest UK home defence drill in several decades, including local responders and ministers.
• 2030: Starmer’s June 2026 line on a possible Russian attack on NATO, which military chiefs in Edinburgh treated as the planning horizon.
• 30%: The Ministry of Defence figure for the two-year rise in Russian vessels threatening UK waters, the naval backdrop to the cable talk.

Some of the online reaction treated the War Book as if it were another independence white paper. It is the opposite document. It assumes the Union’s crisis machinery and then asks Holyrood to operate inside it, because a cable cut off Shetland or a blackout at St Fergus cannot be run from a bunker in the Cotswolds. The 2027 exercise will show whether that split of labour works on paper. Island clinics and the interconnectors will not wait for the constitutional argument to catch up.