Oil the facts?

Clearly, Donald Lewis (Letters 29 December) is unaware of the British government’s 1974 Mccrone Report on the impact of North Sea Oil which was stamped “secret” and locked away for 30 years. Professor Gavin Mccrone said an independent Scotland would be among the world’s richest nations, with a budget surplus so large it would be “embarrassing”.

He predicted that Scotland’s currency would be “the hardest in Europe” and this level of prosperity would continue “for a very long time into thefuture”. Healsosuggested England could borrow from its wealthier neighbour.

During the 30-odd years the report lay in vaults, £300 billion of oil tax revenue flowed from Scotland to the Treasury while Scotland’s industry was devastated. Our surplus oil revenues helped pay for London’s massive transport projects and financed tax cuts for the rich financiers and property speculators of the south-east of England, while Scotland’s infrastructure was neglected.

That Scotland currently runs a deficit is down to Westminster’s mismanagement of the oil industry and Scotland’s economy in general. How else do you explain that Norway, with twice UK output, raised £9,500 million in oil revenues in 2015 whereas the UK only attributed £76m in oil taxes to Scotland?

Over the past 30 years we’ve been told we’d be as poor as Bangladesh if we dared to vote for self-government as the subsidy myth is too politically useful to be simply abandoned. Perhaps in 2017 Scotsman letter writers will admit to the reality that Scotland could survive on its own – and even prosper like our Nordic neighbours or the small Baltic nations.

MARY THOMAS

Watson Crescent, Edinburgh Donald Lewis continues the usual Unionist tradition of defending the Westminster Government’s profligacy with oil revenues, and states that Scotland would still be in deep debt even if it had received all the oil revenues since production started.

It is very strange that Mr Lewis thinks that, of all the oil-producing countries in the world, only Scotland would be worse off if it had received 40 years of massive oil revenues.

Elsewhere in the world, where oil is found, great modern cities rise from desert or swamp.

Across the North Sea, Norway, a country which has produced similar amounts of oil, has the highest standard of living in the world and has ensured that their oil riches will last for ever by investing most of them in their Sovereign wealth fund, now worth almost a trillion dollars, and making every Norwegian worth £120,000.

Here the UK Treasury used the oil revenues to cut taxes for the wealthy from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, with the direct result of rapidly increasing inflation, impacting most directly on poorer people.

It is very true to say that, due to such mismanagement, Scotland has been the only country to produce massive amounts of oil and end up poorer.

It has been a scandal and a tragedy of epic proportions, and a massive betrayal of our children’s future, but there is no hope of any improvement without independence.

JAMES DUNCAN Rattray Grove, Edinburgh