Scotland has long been sold propaganda over its oil

Sir, – Within the totality of lies that have been told by the Westminster Colonial Government none has been so consistent than about oil.

The basic scenario is that the oil is running out and it’s a volatile commodity prone to fluctuation. The propaganda fairytale is then invoked as an argument to say that this means Scotland can never be independent and thus must forever be a supplicant vassal region within the United Kingdom.

Uncle Tom Unionists and right-wing hate preachers then echo these absurd claims on agitprop networks as if they were written on tablets of stone.

The scenario has been employed by lazy unionists ever since the 1970s. Denis Healy admitted that in 1979 the Westminster Government deliberately underplayed the amount left in the North Sea. This was due to the threat posed by devolution.

It was this same Labour government that hid the Mccrone report which showed with oil, Scotland would have been better as an independent nation rather than be ruled by Westminster.

In 2014 businessman Ian Wood again said that oil was running out within 15 years and that this meant Scotland should not leave the UK.

The reason the UK state doesn’t want to lose Scotland is clear. North Sea oil is not running out, 90% of the windfall tax that billionaire Tory Rishi Sunak raised came from the Scottish part of the North Sea.

In 1976 Labour foreign secretary Anthony Crosland told a press conference in

Washington the reason that Scotland was not being granted independence by Westminster was due to the oil.

The economic historian Sidney Pollard argued Thatcherism would have stopped dead in its tracks around 1982 had it not been for North Sea oil.

So not only is Scotland the only country to discover oil and get poorer.

It literally paid for its own economic destruction.

Alan Hinnrichs. Gillespie Terrace, Dundee.