Dave Doogan
MP for Angus and Perthshire Glens · Scottish National Party · United Kingdom
“Industrial hemp is at the forefront of innovation in agriculture, and my constituent Martin Cessford is a farmer at the forefront of that in Scotland. Hemp has great promise for industrial, health, climate and building applications.”
“In the coming weeks, energy bills will rise again for households across the United Kingdom; within the last few days, five major mortgage lenders have pushed up mortgage prices for households across the United Kingdom; and within the last few hours, the cost of a barrel of oil has gone to over $100, pushing up prices at the pumps for moto…”
“Just to develop the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s theme, the Minister is taking some steps to control foreign contributions and donations to politics, but why not just ban them?”
“I welcome the Prime Minister to his place. In so doing, I extend my best wishes not only to him but to his family, as he takes up the manifold burdens of his new role.”
“The Minister will know that the Secretary of State is regularly to be heard talking about his many, many good friends. Does she believe that the Prime Minister-elect is one of those good friends, and, while we are on the subject of young Scots, will it not be awkward when the Secretary of State’s job is taken by another young Scot in the…”
“I note the Minister’s doughty protestations on behalf of the Secretary of State, but noting that is one thing. What message does she have for the 800,000 young Scots who were unable to vote in the 2014 referendum about her party’s continued dogma preventing young people in Scotland from having a say on their constitutional future?”
The complete record
Every one of 605 lines we hold for Dave Doogan, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 2 of 13.
“Now that they have got through the noise of the bang, they are all suffering from some sort of collective cognitive dissonance where they cannot see what a preposterous defence the Prime Minister and the Labour party have mounted. I will frame the rest of what I have to say around honesty, integrity and respect. On honesty, the Prime Minister’s version of events is inconsistent with the evidence in greater or lesser part than that which has been proffered by officials—that much is clear. That in itself is enough to seek recourse to the Privileges Committee. The Prime Minister’s evidence consistently sought to omit that this was a catastrophe of his own making, for the reasons I have set out, in so far as it was political payback.”
“I want to start with a clumsy metaphor. If one is in public office, having anything to do with Peter Mandelson is akin to filling the world’s smallest hot water bottle with the world’s largest kettle, while dressed only in shorts and flip-flops. The question is not whether one will get burned, but how badly—and will it be fatally so? One of the falsehoods that the Prime Minister has sought repeatedly to advance is that it was a mistake to appoint Peter Mandelson. It was no such thing; it was a debt to be repaid. He had to appoint Peter Mandelson to that job. It was a deal he made with the devil. It was a high-stakes political game of Russian roulette. The Prime Minister pulled the trigger when the bullet was in the chamber and it went off at the heart of his Government.”
“In just two weeks’ time, the people of Wales will have an opportunity to elect a Government who genuinely care about child poverty in Wales—Plaid Cymru. In Scotland, the Scottish Government’s child payment has helped protect 407,000 children from UK poverty, and Plaid Cymru will do the same if it prevails on 7 May. Does the Secretary of State agree that Labour’s fag-end Administration in Wales has come to an end and Plaid Cymru’s time has come, and not a moment too soon for the people of Wales?”
“On 3 March, during the Chancellor’s vacuous spring statement, I raised with her that the war which had just started in the middle east would have an inevitable and immediate consequence for energy prices. I asked her what she was going to do about it, and she said that she had no plans to do anything about it. Today, the Chancellor comes to the Chamber like the coo’s tail, talking about fiddling about with contracts for difference next year while my constituents are currently paying nearly £2 a litre for diesel. In Ireland, the Government spent €750 million to support farmers, hauliers, agriculture, fisheries and household energy bills. If the Chancellor were to do the same, the figure would be £8 billion. Where is the £8 billion for our communities, Chancellor?”
“Can the Prime Minister explain what Mandelson’s actual qualities were that he was pursuing for the role as US ambassador, and what steps he has taken to contain the serious and measurable breach in national security that his appointment of Peter Mandelson facilitated?”
“This saga is drawing to a close, and it will come to a conclusion with the Prime Minister’s resignation, whether he can accept that or not. What I cannot accept is the “ask me no secrets and I’ll tell you no lies” regime that he expects us to believe prevailed at the very top of Government between officials and not just Ministers but the Prime Minister. He has talked a lot today about what he did not know and what he was not told. Well, he knew that Mandelson had a serious human frailty for other people’s wealth. We knew that Mandelson was involved with the Russians. We knew that Mandelson was sacked twice as a Government Minister.”
“We support the supporting of British steel in theory, but British manufacturing cannot be put out of work in the process.”
“We were promised a statement on the British industrial competitiveness scheme; we got the Secretary of State talking about foutering around with the energy bills of less than 1% of UK companies and compensating them to some undetermined extent at some period in the next year. That will come as the coldest of comfort for industries across the UK, such as the ScanStone industrial equipment manufacturers in my constituency, which is already burdened with extraordinary energy bills but is not an “intensive” energy user, so it will get no help from this. It will be similarly encumbered by the same Secretary of State’s quotas on steel imports, which stockholders and manufacturers are already saying will risk output. Will he meet me to discuss my constituents’ concerns about his plans?”
“Just three weeks ago at the spring statement, I cautioned the Chancellor that significant fiscal intervention would be required to protect businesses and households in the face of the war in the middle east. She said at that time that, thanks to her actions, the finances of the UK were in robust condition. Now she prevaricates in order to protect those self-same public finances. Those two things cannot be true at the same time. Some 13% of my constituents are reliant on oil; in Scotland the figure is 5%, in England 2%, and in Leeds West and Pudsey it is 0%. Perhaps that is why she provided just £53 million to support oil users, which will not even touch the sides.”
“As defence has contracted into the south-east of England, it has become increasingly irrelevant on the rest of these islands. It is something that happens somewhere else, and there is a price to be paid for that, as people choose other careers and see other political and fiscal priorities as being more important than defence.”
“It is a spleen-venting motion, and there is absolutely no way we can agree with it, much as we might agree with some of the priorities that the Opposition wish to be advanced purely on the defence side. In response to the Opposition’s stated wish to fund their ambitions through the reinstatement of the two-child limit, the Minister referred to the importance of society. We do not invest in the importance and the priority of defence by marginalising people in society. It is essential that our communities have a sense of belonging in defence, and that defence has a sense of belonging in them. I speak from experience in Scotland, where defence has become an increasingly remote activity, as it has in large parts of England as well. I am not making a constitutional point.”
“Whatever has gone well in defence and whatever has gone wrong in defence in the United Kingdom over the last 50 years, it is the responsibility of the two main parties, one currently in opposition and one currently in government, and the ping-pong back and forth today has been a bit difficult to listen to. I heard the Minister’s plea earlier for us to inject some seriousness into the debate. He directed it over here although he could equally have directed it to those behind him, but I agree with him that this is a serious issue, not just because we have troops deployed but because, as others have pointed out, the first duty of Government is to defend the state and the people. I also agree with him that the motion in the name of His Majesty’s Opposition is a bit of a catch-all.”
“I think the hon. Gentleman thinks that he is being smart. I do not need to be reminded where Trident is based, and neither do the people of Scotland. We do not need to be reminded where the bullseye of the target on these islands is based. I do not need to be reminded how many Scots were asked whether they would like the UK’s supposedly independent nuclear deterrent to be based in our waters. I do not need to be reminded of that for one second—and in case the hon. Gentleman is under any illusions, which he apparently is, let me point out that the United Kingdom spends more money on defence in the south-west of England than it spends in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. He might like to reflect on that.”
“Some of us have the privilege of speaking on defence and on the economy, and the fact that the current Chancellor of the Exchequer is the arbiter of how our nation, or rather this state, will be defended in the future is deeply concerning given her competence in generic fiscal matters, let alone issues to do with defence.”
“I respect his position, but I deeply disagree with him. We cannot honour our service personnel in uniform and then besmirch the manufacturers that equip them to do the job of defending us that we require them to do. Similarly, the Government must come clean on the defence investment plan. It is simply not tenable. The Minister was clear with us in saying that Defence was very clear about what we required from the defence investment plan. That, alarmingly, tells us what the problem with the defence investment plan is, and it is the Treasury.”
“I will make some progress. A key problem for the current Government is that when they took over in 2024, they set great store by their strategic defence review. They said that they were going to fix defence from the ground up, and that it would all be in the strategic defence review, but when the strategic defence review was published it contained more questions than answers, principal among which was the defence investment plan. That was going to come in the summer. Then it was the autumn and then it was the winter and now it is the spring, and we do not even know whether we will get it in the following summer. It is critical for businesses to plan on this basis. I know that the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) takes a dim view of business and its role in defence, and takes a dim view of defence manufacturers.”
“It totally ignores the fact that, at current rates, hard-working taxpayers in Scotland contribute £5 billion every single year to the defence of the United Kingdom. That has been airbrushed from reality.”
“We will disagree on that last point, but I am very happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman on the benefit of complex warship manufacturing in Scotland. It would be nice if it was occasionally framed as something other than a benevolent gesture from Westminster towards Scotland, as opposed to what it actually is: the United Kingdom benefiting from the skills and engineering expertise that have been present in Scotland for an awful long time. [ Interruption. ] I would not go that far. That leads me to an intervention that was made on the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who declared that an independent Scotland would be completely defenceless and penniless. Classic Unionism!”
“The United Kingdom invests so much in the independent nuclear deterrent—more than £100 billion over a 10-year period—but the Government cannot even tell us the 10-year rolling price. It is not independent, and I do not believe that it makes us any safer. We would be far safer if we invested that money in playing a leading role in Europe in conventional defence. I further disagree with the unilateral decision of the UK Government to suddenly go and buy F-35As for gravity-drop nuclear weapons without even so much as a debate in this House. I think that clarifies for the hon. Member my position on the non-independent nuclear deterrent. I implore the Government to get their finger out and get the DIP published.”
“One thing that unites the Prime Minister of Israel and the supreme leader of Iran is that neither could care less about what the UK Prime Minister says, and it is difficult to imagine that the US President is not in a similar camp. With fiscal headroom evaporating, business confidence vanishing and household budgets being shredded by this war, what can the Secretary of State offer, over and above the vacuous calls for de-escalation, to ensure that people on these islands are protected from the ferocious effects of this war on the supply of energy?”
“The shadow Secretary of State mentioned his perception of the intransigence of this Labour Government, to which I would add their brittle hubris in their pursuit of not achieving any form of economic growth. Does he agree that the Chancellor would not have to keep dipping into the pockets of hard-working people in the midst of a cost of living crisis if she had a clue about how to achieve economic growth?”
“What evidence did the Chancellor have to suggest there was profiteering in petrol retailing? The Petrol Retailers Association rightly took umbrage at the implication of the Chancellor; I think that did not go quite the way that she thought it would.”
“I raised this entirely inevitable circumstance with the Chancellor at the spring statement, and she did something that she is given to do, which was to glaze over briefly and then talk about the strength and broad shoulders of the Treasury because of the difficult decisions that she had taken, as though they affected her and not the working people up and down these islands who have had their bank accounts raided by an insatiable appetite for more and more tax from this Government.”
“The specific 5p fuel duty referred to in the motion, is regressive—that much is pretty clear—and iniquitous. It is particularly iniquitous to people who live in parts of these islands that are more remote, such as my constituency. I see that the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) is back in the Chamber. She detailed that her constituency is 2,076 sq km. This is not a competition, but Angus and Perthshire Glens is 5,525 sq km and 166% larger than her constituency, actually.”
“I am very happy to explain that to the hon. Lady when I get to that element of my speech, which I will in due course. The other thing that really irritates me about this Government is the way that they talk about the just transition. They say, “We will be using fossil fuels for another 50 years, and we will be producing them in the United Kingdom”, as though they hold all the levers. Let me explain something to Members on the Government Front Bench: if they continue to apply Labour’s atrophying interventions in the North sea oil and gas sector, the industry, which is global—I do not know whether that is news to Ministers—will go somewhere where it can make a living and a profit and does not have some sort of nefarious Government taxing it out of existence.”
“Oil has gone up sometimes by 150%, so a £300 to £400 delivery is getting on for £1,000. There are also punitive requirements for the volume that people get delivered. A further 2,000 people in my constituency are on tankered gas. That must not be forgotten in this cost spike crisis, which, as I said, I predicted at the Chancellor’s spring statement.”
“The public services delivered in constituencies such as mine are very much more expensive to deliver than those in Holborn and St Pancras. It is on that point that we need to see how much harder this issue will impact on people in rural areas. I have looked at the “Fuel Finder” app. At the BP petrol station at the bottom of Montrose before crossing the river, the price of a litre of petrol is 149.9p. If I go to the BP petrol station over at Vauxhall Bridge Road, the price of a litre of petrol is 5p cheaper. People in Scotland are already paying a premium that people in London and the south-east do not pay on their fuel, and the 5p that the Labour party wants to apply will come on top of that. The UK rate of oil consumption for heating is 4.9%. In Angus and Perthshire Glens, the rate is 13%. Some 6,101 households heat their homes with oil.”
“This is where I practise respectful disagreement. For rural areas such as my constituency, the constituency of the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan, and many other places across all four nations, this issue is really challenging. There is not limited access to public transport in many places such as ours; there is no access to public transport in any meaningful sense. Remote areas get a lot more winter, and the people there tend to work in more agricultural professions. They tend to drive larger, heavier vehicles that are more fuel-hungry, so they will end up paying more. Deliveries have to come from further away, and that all gets added to the cost. Of course, all that adds to the cost to councils of delivering public services.”
“Before the hon. Lady gets back to her feet, she asked me about tax and she should be aware—although apparently she is not—that most income tax payers in Scotland pay less tax. Over and above that, her constituents do not have to pay for their tuition fees when they go to university. All her constituents, like my constituents, pay 30% less for their council tax than people in England. The Scottish living wage that her constituents benefit from is 74p per hour higher than the UK’s minimum wage. Of course, her constituents get the £40 Scottish child payment on top of all the other benefits that the SNP has delivered. On that note, I will take her intervention.”
“The 5p added to the price of fuel is actually 6p, because it is added before the VAT is added to the fuel, so it is not 5p at all. I am pretty certain that we can read in the Government’s amendment to the motion the vacuous nature of their application to this subject. Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I am pretty confident that a wee bit closer to the time of the elections in Scotland and Wales in May, the Government will suddenly find the wit to scrap this hike in fuel duty. I am quite happy for them to do that, but as other people have pointed out, households are in crisis now. Now is the time for the Government to lead, but that will never happen with a Labour Government.”
“I do not have the detail of the Scottish Government’s plans, but I am pretty sure that nobody in England or anywhere else in the United Kingdom has received actual monetary support from that funding. Let us be really clear. The Chancellor talks about the broad shoulders of the Treasury and says that thanks to her fiscal wit—if you can believe that—she has come up with £52.4 million. If we divide that money across the number of people who will need support, it comes out at about £35. That is £35 of support from a Labour Government for people seeing a £700-odd price shock in heating oil. Somebody somewhere in the Treasury needs to get themselves a calculator. The fuel duty increase is inflationary: it will feed through to the prices of goods and services, all of which will subsequently have VAT added on to them.”
“There was a pork-barrel stench when the first defence growth deal was awarded to the Minister’s constituency. Over six months later, he has finally got around to making an award to Scotland, but for Scotland, the £50 million has turned into £20 million—and he wants the Scottish Government to foot the bill. Can he be clear with the House today about why, while there are no strings attached to the £50 million for the Welsh defence growth deal, there are strings attached to the Scottish defence growth deal, and does he expect the Scottish Government to top up the £20 million that he has allocated, so that it becomes the £50 million that every other area has got?”
“We have just heard a 40-minute, self-aggrandising monologue on how wonderful everything is in the economy. Does the Chancellor have any clue how her tone-deaf monologue will have landed in the real economy, where growth has been downgraded, unemployment is soaring and the cost of energy has just spiked? There was nothing in her statement about what she intends to do on a strategic level when energy goes to the price it was during the height of the Ukraine crisis. Rather than reading her pre-prepared SNP attack lines, will she guarantee that she will step in and protect bill payers if those prices endure?”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. First, I would like to correct the record; as you can clearly see, Sir Alec, the SNP are very much in this debate, contrary to the claims of the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone).”
“Those are all reasonable and practical changes that can be presumed to have a positive effect on the regime, in contrast to what the Government are proposing with their merger of the two sections. Today’s debate is well attended and people are speaking passionately about the strength of feeling that they from their constituents all up and down these islands—mine included—that there is enough burden on ordinary people in rural communities trying to maintain the countryside in the way that we all expect them to. They are trying to make their farm businesses work properly and deal with the effects of challenges ranging from the family farm tax to employer national insurance contributions, and from the business property relief to the tax on crew cab pickups. Many people across rural Britain are thinking, “What next from central Government?”.”
“As well as that, we need far more robust public protections. Do not let me forget to mention that, despite the work that Police Scotland’s licensing unit does, many of my constituents and others in Scotland still have to run the gauntlet with the general practice regime, which is by no means straightforward; that is certainly also something that should be looked at. Strengthening firearms licensing units throughout the United Kingdom would be positive; standardisation of it would be positive; electronic record keeping would be positive, and so would closing the gaps in private shotgun sales by requiring sellers to verify buyer certificates directly with issuing police via a secure online portal.”
“If the regulation had been applied effectively in that instance, there is a good probability that that tragedy would never have happened. Around 25% of firearms applications already take more than a year to process and 30 out of 43 police forces in England and Wales have missed the four-month processing target already. Licensing fees have risen by 133% and applying section 1 checks to all shotguns risks overwhelming an already underperforming system, which will present clear demonstrable challenges to our rural communities. Police Scotland operate a single national licensing unit, which consistently outperforms forces in England and Wales—I say that not as a cheap political point but because, quite clearly, if we centralise, standardise and properly resource the licensing regime, we will see substantial improvements in turnaround times.”
“That is vital, but so too is ensuring that any measures to modify the regulation around public safety are effective. Where it is seen to not be effective—and it is clearly demonstrated that these measures will not be effective—we should be very sceptical indeed. I will not cover again the points that others have made on the well-documented difference in effect and lethality between firearms and shotguns. That substantial difference in lethality is why, dating back to 1920, they have been categorised differently. That difference has not changed; it is the same difference in 2026. If we look to tragedies such as that which happened in Plymouth, the problem that facilitated that tragedy was one not of regulatory impropriety, but of application of the regulation.”
“As other right hon. and hon. Members have attested, concern is growing that perhaps this Government are not fully conversant—or nearly conversant enough—with what goes on in rural communities. In terms of the evidence On public safety, I do not think that anybody in the Chamber is minded or motivated to get in the way of something that would improve firearms or shotgun control to protect the public. No one would object to that. What people in this Chamber, and many people outside it, object to is a vast increase in the bureaucratic burden that will deliver no significant increase in public safety. As other Members have pointed out, during this debate we should remember those who have suffered at the hands of delinquent use of shotguns and firearms.”
“It is only fair that I accept both of those from the hon. Member. We are here because of the 121,000 signatures on the petition, and many of the constituencies with the highest counts of signatures are in Scotland, where gun ownership per capita is much higher than it is elsewhere in these isles, for entirely predictable and understandable reasons. Angus and Perthshire Glens has the highest response rate in the United Kingdom; 550 opponents of the Government’s proposal have come forward from my constituency. They have good reason, because whether someone is up Glen Prosen, Glen Isla, Glen Clova, Glen Esk, or Glen Lethnot, or in Strathtay, Strathtummel or Strathmore, their possession, operation, use and discharge of their shotgun is just a part of everyday life. It is an essential tool for the maintenance of a rural way of living.”
“I completely agree that the Government have to look again at it and listen carefully. I know it is a serious Minister who has come to speak to the debate today, so I am hopeful that we will get clear remarks on how the Government intend to properly interrogate the consultation and divine from the responses precisely how seriously licence holders take the issue. Licence holders are not looking for an easy life—if they were, they would not be in the employment they are in. They are not looking for any shortcuts. They are looking for a robust regime, but one that respects and understands the rural way of life.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. On 10 February, the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry was called to the House to answer an urgent question about a meeting between Palantir, Peter Mandelson and the Prime Minister in February 2025, after which there was an uncompeted award of £245 million from the Ministry of Defence to Palantir. No fewer than four times, the Minister said that he did not know whether there were minutes for that meeting in existence, yet following my inquiries, the Cabinet Office had confirmed back in October 2025 that no such minutes existed. Can you advise us on whether MPs should continue to endure this disgraceful level of briefing of Ministers, who tell us in the House that they do not know something that another element of Government plainly knows very well?”
“The energy market in Scotland operates in surplus in both generation and transmission, whereas the energy market in England operates in shortage in both generation and transmission. Unfortunately, that means that in a GB energy market, Scotland gets sucked in to subsidising energy costs for English consumers. Over and above that, Energy UK has made it clear that there will be no meaningful reduction in energy bills until some indeterminate point in the 2030s. Will the Minister recommit—just before the Scottish elections—to energy bills in Scotland being £300 lower in 2029 than in 2024?”
“It shows yet more extraordinarily poor judgment on the part of the Prime Minister that he met personally with Palantir—a highly questionable organisation that is complicit in the ruination of Palestine and the devastation wreaked in the US by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir are into the United Kingdom taxpayer for half a billion pounds, half of which was not competed. We should be concerned about Palantir, full stop. We should be concerned, in addition, about a direct award. We should be further concerned by the company being a client of Peter Mandelson and then having a meeting with the Prime Minister—for which there are apparently no minutes. When will Downing Street come up with a confirmed position on whether minutes were or were not taken in that meeting with Mandelson?”
“Constituents of mine have restored the Alyth hotel. It has gone from near dereliction to being an outstanding venue for dining and drinking, and a hotel. However, they are smothered by the compound burden of VAT rates, wage costs, duty increases, employer national insurance contributions, energy costs and the squeeze on spending. That is why there were 8,000 fewer jobs in hospitality in December than in November, and 20,000 fewer than in September. Will the Chancellor consider reducing VAT on hospitality to the 7% it is in Germany, the 9% it is in Ireland, or the 10% it is in Spain and Italy?”
“It does not say “English Business Rates” up there on the annunciator, so I assume the Minister can confirm that the budget—the departmental expenditure limit—for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government will increase with the new money, which will mean Barnett consequentials for the devolved nations. What will the quantum of that be, and when will it be delivered?”
“However, in March 2025, the MOD could not confirm via written parliamentary questions how much would be spent on maintaining and improving SLA, with the amount ranging from £445 million to £619 million. I wonder whether the Minister can narrow that figure down for the House this evening. Moreover, those figures have not been broken down to differentiate between Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. As such, there is no confirmation of how much will be spent on SLA for personnel serving in Scotland. The House of Commons Library confirmed in 2024 that the MOD managed 47,700 properties, 91.5% of which were in England and Wales, with 6.6% in Scotland. How will these much needed and urgent improvements be marshalled across each establishment and each nation? With that, Madam Deputy Speaker, I wish the Minister every success with the Bill.”
“The UK has a relatively small per-capita standing army by European standards, so it was disappointing that the SDR merely recommended no further reductions in the size of the regular forces, instead of showing the patently required ambition to grow in order to ensure that our armed forces are able to maintain the defence and resilience of the homeland and our commitments to NATO. I support the taking back into public ownership of service accommodation and the ending of the appalling commercial contracts, which have been well documented in countless debates in this place. I also welcome the Government’s establishment of the Defence Housing Service.”
“The Bill needs to address the recruitment crisis in our armed forces, so it remains a concern that the Government are seeking in the Bill to ensure less parliamentary scrutiny over the size of the armed forces instead of facilitating more. The most recent targets were set in 2021. Currently, the UK armed forces overall are 6% below target at almost 9,000 personnel short—a loss of 11,128 personnel across the UK since 2014. In April 2014, there were 11,100 regular armed forces in Scotland; in April 2021, that had gone down to 10,440. In 2014, the UK Government committed to increasing the number of Scotland-based personnel to 12,500—I would be interested if the Minister could advise what the figure is now.”
“I will not labour the point, except to say that the provisions for sexual harm prevention orders and sexual risk orders in clause 5 are still sadly very much required. We must have confidence that our young people who decide to join the armed forces can do so knowing that while it may or may not prove to be the career or job for them, they can sign up, train, qualify and serve in the knowledge that they will not be predated upon by either their peers or their superiors. Clause 5 will not directly apply in Scotland, but will of course benefit from legislative consent motions in order that a similar effect will be established there for the safety and security of our uniformed personnel.”