Tuesday 5 August 2014

Oil !

Yes, let's talk about. Must we?
It's an earner, isn't it? A good thing.
On the basis that thereabout 90% of the stuff on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) lies off Scotland and the Islands to the north, and imagining that 'we' input that to the UK Treasury, then Scotland is a net contributor to the UK's coffers! Well, most years. All good.
And even better, if we kept that to ourselves post-independence, as we surely will, then we'll be in the money. Hence lots of stories circulating that the UK is downplaying new oil finds (until after a no vote), and overstating the depletion of the oil reserves, the bastards, once again.

Well look here, 'we' have never lived on the seabed (for a few epochs anyway). We're lucky that there is oil out there. And yet we propose to draw a line in the sea out from 'our' border (the place where we stopped fighting the English 500 years ago) and say that anything north of that is 'ours'. We'll have the Shetland stuff too, thanks, although they're a bit of a recent addition to the Kingdom. And those people that just live down the coast a bit - those prosperous souls in Seahouses, Newcastle, South Shields, Sunderland.... they're not getting any of it! Nor their wee weans. That's because we're the wonderful social democratic Scots, the enemies of inequality. The champions of fairness. And we'll fight you for it, just as we did 500 years ago!
Progressive politics, indeed. Back to the new world order.

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