Celtic nuclear fallout ahead

Given today's arrogant and hubristic announcement from the Scottish and Welsh Nats that they intend to try and hold the country and market confidence to ransom in the event of a hung Parliament, I thought this was appropriate to raise.

"Island chosen for nuclear plant

The UK's next nuclear power plant could be built on the island of Anglesey by 2020.

Horizon Nuclear Power says it will apply for planning consent in 2012 to build a reactor on the island to produce up to 3,300Mw of electricity.

Wylfa, the existing nuclear plant, will be decommissioned in December.

Plaid Cymru leader and Anglesey AM Ieuan Wyn Jones said it was an economic boost, and Labour MP Albert Owen called it a vote of confidence in the area.

County council leader Clive McGregor said the move would have a "positive impact" on the community and deliver "high quality jobs".

He said: "We have suffered tremendous job losses over the last few years.

'Vital contribution'

Alan Smith, Horizon's Wylfa project manager, said the plant "would make a vital contribution to meeting the country's energy needs and tackling the challenge of climate change"."

So, one assumes, the "Celtic Alliance" could be in for a bit of falling-out over, for example, whether to have any future minimum carbon price benefiting nuclear as well as renewables.

2009 oil & gas production

Last time I looked at this, the UK government were forecasting total combined oil & gas production for 2009 to be just over 9% down on 2008.

The actuals are now out.

2009 was a rather staggering 9.4% down on 2008.

I will leave the obvious comments as an exercise for the reader.

Ship porn: HMSs Dauntless and Astute

(They're in the Clyde. So it's relevant!)

Osama Saeed - well, well, well

I'm hardly breaking the news since I saw it on the front page of the Mail in the shop about 15 minutes ago, but apparently Salmond's best buddy Osama Saeed is resigning from his Scottish Islamic Foundation in the wake of a devastating auditors' report.

What are the odds on him staying as a Nat candidate, I wonder?

Don't think I need to comment further.

Other than noting that, of course, this is all the fault of "Westminster", and could not possibly have happened in an "independent" Scotland.

A quote from just before a rather famous Scottish battle...

"Remember, you are the free soldiers of a free people.

Go forth, show yourselves like men, and your enemies will as snow in the sun melt before you."

Which battle and which general?

Answers by comment please.

(With thanks to the new edition of the NTS magazine, Scotland in Trust.)

Clever Jim, Silly Swinney

It's taken me a wee while to get round to this, but never mind.

Back in June 2009 Jim Murphy's Scotland Office put out this paper on the relationship between oil revenues and public spending in Scotland.

I blogged about it here; concluding that they were absolutely right to state that Scotland has had all the oil revenues that it could possibly ever have claimed, and more, spent in Scotland. Wrong however to try and over-egg things by adding up a long time-series of money numbers without correcting for inflation. Sort of like adding up apples and helicopters to see how many bananas you have.

They followed up with a sequel in January 2010, which, basically does the same thing again, with more of a focus on the post-devolution period.

Ho hum.

But the response they provoked from the Nats was quite interesting and very useful.

"Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland is the official report, and it contains the real figures for 2007-8 ..."

(Plus a lot of financially incoherent drivel, claiming that capital spending doesn't count because, er, it doesn't. It's also obvious that the quotes in that story couldn't have come from Swinney because we know that under pressure he starts spouting management-consultant bolleaux and sounds like Kryten out of Red Dwarf; the belligerent tosh on display bears rather the signature of Salmond's own spin-thug, Kevin Pringle.)

But isn't this a marvellous, and possibly very clever (if deliberate) thing for Murphy to have done?

He provoked Swinney (or at least Pringle pretending to be Swinney) into endorsing GERS as being factually correct.

After all these years of the Nats denouncing GERS as being "distorted", "flawed", "lies", and so on.

Dishing, irretrievably, the idea that somehow there are all these "lost" or "stolen" billions which would somehow transform the finances of Scotland if "independence" were to happen.

No, we'd just have to plod along with the same amount of income, while incurring all the extra costs of duplicating things like DWP and the Treasury, and setting up vanities and fripperies like embassies and a Foreign Office, and paying £300m a year more to the EU as we lost our share of the existing UK rebate.

Attractive?

Thought not.

Like I said in the title: Clever Jim, Silly Swinney.