Scotland’s £350m untapped opportunity

Sir, – The famous figure of £350 million a week, emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus and purported to be the bonus to the NHS if the UK left the EU, has long since been discredited. But is still talked about.

However that big number can still be accurately applied to Scotland today.

It just so happens £350m per week is the value of the daily output of oil from Scottish Jurisdiction waters – and the figure has been a lot higher in the past.

Yet this astonishing value is never publicised, even in Scotland.

Just why Scottish oil – by far Scotland’s biggest industry – rarely makes headlines requires some explanation.

My interest in Scotland’s North Sea oil goes back a long time.

I wrote the SNP’S 1970s Oil Campaign booklet “The Reality Of Scotland’s Oil”.

It pointed out the real benefits of having discovered massive amounts of oil in the North Sea would pass Scotland by if we did not become independent.

Well, we did not become independent in the 1970s, and we are still not independent in 2019.

And, yes, the benefits of the tens of billions of barrels of oil from Scottish waters over the past 45 years, all under the control and direction of the Westminster Government, have well and truly passed us by.

On the other side of our North Sea boundary lies our independent neighbour, Norway.

She discovered oil in her waters around the same time as we did. However being an independent country, Norway was totally in charge of the exploitation of her own oil.

How has she fared over the past 45 years?

For a start she has accrued a major stake in the ownership of her own oilfields. One of the most amazing outcomes of 45 years of Westminster control of the oil is, not only does Scotland have no stake in our oil, even the UK Government does not. But a whole raft of state oil companies have stakes in our oilfields.

Norway has also accrued a massive indigenous expertise and manufacturing capacity in oil exploration and development.

For example our so-called Scottish-located “floating” wind farms are actually Norwegian designed and built.

Norway also has the biggest Sovereign

Wealth Fund in the world. A whopping £1 trillion and still rising.

How did they reach that figure? Easy, independence.

We cannot go back now but we must recognise that Scotland’s oil is still a massive asset.

Oil and gas will still be coming out of the North Sea, and all around the world, for decades, such will be the timescale of any climate change transition.

Control of it will still bring tangible benefits to an independent Scotland, both in revenue terms and in terms of balance of payments.

The latter factor is one of the main reasons why Westminster will use every dirty trick to maintain control of our oil.

Nick Dekker.

1 Nairn Way, Cumbernauld.