As SNP’S accused of squandering billions, there must be an inquiry
AT first, it’s easy to be furious, but there’s too much fury in Scottish politics. Anger is fine, it’s understandable, but more important is cold, calm, implacable scrutiny. And after scrutiny, if blame is apportioned, then there must be consequences.
We’ve just learned that Scotland is expected to lose an estimated £60 billion through mishandling of the much criticised Scotwind deal, which saw tracts of the seabed leased to investors. If true – and the only means of establishing the truth is through a public inquiry – then SNP negligence has deeply wounded Scotland.
Last December, the Scottish Government said: “The Scottish budget for 2023 to 2024 has been set at £59.7 billion.” There’s quite a lot that could be done with lost money equivalent to a year’s budget.
The SNP bleats endlessly about having no funds. It can’t give striking teachers a rise, it claims, as the cupboard is bare. Scottish councils face shedding 7000 jobs and immolating public services due to budget shortfalls. Let’s be clear, if the claims of £60 billion being squandered are true, then matters would be very different today.
The claim also renders the SNP’S ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card null and void for evermore. The Scottish Government repeatedly blames wicked
London when it comes to lack of money. Westminster controls the purse strings, we’re told. And that’s true. But the Get Out of Jail Free card no longer works, if the Scottish Government just threw billions down the toilet. Nicola Sturgeon can no longer hide behind Westminster if she did indeed preside over this failure. Financial blame ceases to be a matter solely for London and becomes a matter for Edinburgh too.
The analysis of the Scotwind deal was undertaken by the pro-independence think tank Common Weal. It says that in the year since the Scotwind announcement “at least three more offshore wind auctions have concluded, two in the USA and one in England. All three … raised many times more money for their respective governments than Scotwind did. On a comparative basis, these auctions raised up to 40 times as much as Scotwind”.
It found that had Scotwind raised as much per megawatt as a similar sale in America, £16.4 billion would have accrued in one payment. If Scotwind had matched the performance of a recent English auction, it may have raised around £28 billion.
Scotwind raised just £700 million. Common Weal adds: “Beyond the financial disaster that Scotwind has been, the promises of supply chain protections have not been met. Only a little over a third of the minimum investments committed to Scotwind will take place in Scotland.” That sees billions more potentially lost that could have gone to the Scottish public purse.
For example, there’s the Sealtainn project fronted by Ireland’s state-owned energy firm ESB. Of its £2.24bn spend, it’s claimed, just 14.8% will be in Scotland.
Remember that the Scottish Government failed to deliver on its promise of a state-owned energy company. It could have sold Scotwind energy to the grid and retained profits. Instead Scotland could see between £3.5£5.5 billion in profits going overseas. Wales is now setting up its state energy company.
There’s a pattern emerging. The SNP has a gift for thinking up good ideas, but then trashing them through execrable execution. Take trans rights. It’s good to extend rights for a marginalised minority. However, the way the legislative reforms unfolded was dreadful. Trans rights became conflated in the public mind with sex offenders in female prisons. Trans people were mired in hate and chaos. Woman were made to feel scared of how our jails operate. And human rights – which was what the matter was about in the first place – got sidelined in the furore.
Similarly, it’s clearly good to capitalise on Scotland’s abundant green energy resources. What isn’t good is chucking billions of pounds away.
Even something seemingly mundane like the deposit return scheme – intended to improve recycling across Scotland – looks set to go off the rails due to awful planning.
Right now, the SNP is preparing to create Scotland’s National Care Service. But the red flags are already going up left, right and centre. Staff and unions fear they’ll be under more stress; 71% of social work staff believe the plans will have a negative impact on standards of care. A Holyrood committee said the reforms – under the National Care Service Bill – shouldn’t go ahead in their current form.
Given its history of policy disaster, we can only hope the SNP pauses for thought here instead of gambling with Scotland’s most vulnerable people in the pursuit of cheap headlines.
And that seems to be the crux of the problem. The SNP is essentially Blairite: it comes up with ideas which it thinks will get gold stars all round, only to fail miserably due to terrible planning, resulting in negative headlines, which are now starting to translate into slippage in the polls. Irony, eh?
There’s an innate inability in the SNP to make policy work, or to take responsibility for failure. Common Weal is bang on when it calls for an inquiry into “how [the Scottish Government] got the Scotwind auction so badly wrong”.
It’s also reasonable to ask what has gone wrong with the Scottish civil service. Are senior officials so cowed by the Sturgeon government that they fear speaking the truth? Are they too ineffectual to see mistakes on the horizon? Or have they simply drank the kool-aid and walk in lock-step with ministers?
The only positive? It now becomes impossible for the SNP to constantly deflect blame onto Westminster when it comes to money, given the Scottish government could have raised billions if ministers acted responsibly. Instead, brutal cuts loom.
There’s something of the deluded Liz Truss now about the Scottish government, with its philosophy of blame everyone but yourself.
The SNP’S failures are either down to the fact that it’s too focused on independence to govern properly, or else ministers, including the First Minister, are simply out of their depth. Perhaps, if the Sturgeon administration shuts up about the promised land for once, and focuses on the business of good governance, the electorate will be able to decide which is true.
Offshore wind auctions in the US and England raised 40 times as much as Scotwind