Another costly SNP disaster for industry

THE SNP did not lack for hyperbole on renewable energy, with promises of jobs bonanzas.

Who could f orget Alex Salmond’s improbable claim that Scotland would become the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’?

In reality, taxpayers’ millions have vanished with little to show for it.

Now renewables fabrication firm BiFab has gone into administration, after the SNP Government pulled the plug on vital investment. The firm had been preparing to put up to 500 employees back to work on a wind turbine scheme when it emerged that ministers could no longer provide the necessary financial support.

The Scottish Government put £52million into BiFab when it was facing complete collapse more than two years ago.

The BiFab yards were seen as the key to Scotland deriving manufacturing benefits from billions of pounds being invested in wind farms. A major opportunity has been missed – but recent history tells us this fiasco was all too predictable.

Sadly, the SNP is notoriously poor at grasping what business is about.

In 2013, the Scottish Government purchased Prestwick Airport with the stated aim of protecting jobs.

Yet debts totalling £39.9million as a result of a bailout remain outstanding.

A project to build two ferries at the nationalised Ferguson Marine shipyard will finish nearly five years late.

It was supposed to cost £97million but the bill more than doubled.

BiFab is just the latest stark example of the SNP’s dead hand – a clumsy intervention that has badly backfired. As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes elsewhere in this paper today: ‘So much for the SNP standing up for our national interest.’

Meanwhile, union bosses said the latest shambles ‘exposes the myth of Scotland’s renewables revolution’, after a ‘decade of political hypocrisy and f ailure’. The Scottish Government has said it remains committed to securing a new future for BiFab, and it must step up those efforts.

The First Minister expressed ‘regret’ and said she was ‘ deeply disappointed’ by yesterday’s developments. It’s yet another costly disaster from a government that has prioritised constitutional game-playing over economic revival.