Production cost cuts mean healthy future for oil and gas revenues in Scotland

The SNP doesn’t need a spin machinetoinformcolinhamilton (Letters, 24 April) that there is a healthy future for oil and gas revenues in Scotland.

Productioncostshavehalved since 2014 and it is now forecast that 11.7 billion barrels should be recovered by 2050 which at the current price of $74 would be worth $865 billion to the Scottish economy.

This will go some way to shelter Scotland’s regional branch economy from the worst effects of Brexit and Westminster’s fiscal policies that have resulted in the lowest growth in the G20. However, Scotland remains the only home nation that has exported more than it imported every year since records began.

Your writer Paris Gourtsoyannis writes that Scottish MPS have been sidelined by their leadership but, although the SNP voted against Article 50, it is the two-thirds of Scottish voters who back Remain that are not strongly heard at Westminster or in the Londonbased media as the majority of Tory and Labour MPS are backing Brexit despite increasing evidence that Scotland will be harder hit than the UK.

MARY THOMAS Watson Crescent, Edinburgh For dogged and desperate determination to drag out the non-story of the link between the SNP and Cambridge Analytica, you have to hand it to Colin Hamilton (Letters, 24 April).

The facts are not “prisoners” as Mr Hamilton claims and were in fact set free days ago. However, they may bear repeating and are as follows. An external consultant acting for the SNP had one meeting with Cambridge Analytica and advised the SNP not to touch them with the proverbial barge pole. Now we have people like Ruth Davidson and Colin Hamilton agitating to be told the name of the consultant, but to what purpose? Presumably so that they can now hound someone for providing what has turned out to be very sound advice.

I don’t know if Mr Hamilton has been in business, but if he has, client/consultant confidentiality has never crossed his radar. I have personal experience of the nature of the business of providing consultancy advice and consultants have the right to expect the client to respect their confidentiality.

Of course, if Nicola Sturgeon had named the consultant without reference to the person concerned there would have been a flurry of letters from people like Mr Hamilton complaining about a lack of professional integrity on the part of the SNP.

GILL TURNER Derby Street, Edinburgh In his latest blog, SNP MP Pete Wishart lists things the SNP must address if a new drive for independence is to succeed. One of these is what he calls “perceived deficits”.

Presumably this is a reference to Scotland’s fiscal deficit, the gap between public income and spending, which thescottishgovernment’sown figures calculated as £13.3bn for 2016-17, or 8.3 per cent of GDP, more than three times the level for the UK as a whole.

With his use of the word “perceived” Mr Wishart follows the quaint Scottish Nationalist tradition of implying that any inconvenient statistic or fact might somehow have been fabricated.

When the SNP’S Growth Commission findings at last emerge from the spin doctors’ final edit, it will be interesting to see how Scotland’s fiscal deficit is reimagined into being an opportunity rather than a threat.

KEITH HOWELL West Linton, Peeblesshire