VICEROY Murray is on a junket to Malaysia and Singapore to promote “Brand Scotland,” a PR campaign with a £750,000 budget so the Viceroy can flit around the world in style.
Earlier this month he was in Norway to promote Scotland’s energy sector. He asked the Norwegian state-owned Equinor to buy up more of Scotland’s renewable energy assets. It already owns and operates Hywind Scotland, the world’s first floating wind farm.
READ MORE: Scottish Secretary Ian Murray to visit Malaysia and Singapore
Norwegian state-owned green energy giant Statkraft bought a 450MW “water battery” project near Loch Ness to store renewable energy, and operates several onshore wind Scottish wind farms. I wonder if the Viceroy pondered why Norway, with a population and resource base similar to Scotland’s, is so prosperous.
SSE Renewables and SSE plc is English and half-owned by institutional investors like BlackRock, and operates some of the largest renewables projects in Scotland.
Two other foreign governments, France and Sweden, control large parts of Scotland’s renewables sector. France’s state-owned EDF operates the Neart na Goitre offshore wind farm, and the Dorenell wind farm. Swedish state-owned Vattenfall controls the Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm and the Clashindarroch II Wind Farm to be constructed in Aberdeenshire.
Scottish Power is a subsidiary of Spanish energy company Iberdrola, whose shareholders include BlackRock and the Qatar Investment Authority, and operates renewables projects like Whitelee wind farm.
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All profits flow to these foreign entities, not to Scotland.
If the Viceroy cared about Scotland, he’d want Scotland to control and profit from its resources. Instead, he promotes the English Labour GB Energy shell company that’s received just £125 million and whose CEO resides in Manchester.
Instead of jetting off to the Far East to scrounge for lousy trade deals, he should fight for Scotland to regain access to the huge EU market.
The Viceroy’s loyalties lie with his London masters and he’s hoping to don some ermine and retire with his fat pension pot.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
UNBEKNOWNST to many, the latest chapter in the economic disaster that is Brexit opens next month.
As of December 13, some businesses in Great Britain will be forced to stop selling to customers in Northern Ireland and the EU, because of new EU product safety rules.
The EU’s new General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) will apply in Northern Ireland, as well as the EU, due to the fact that Northern Ireland effectively remained in the EU’s single market for goods after Brexit.
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These regulations update existing rules and aim to give better protection for consumers when shopping online and improving product recalls. This includes creating new requirements for businesses in Great Britain selling to Northern Ireland or the EU, including the need for a “responsible person”, which is effectively a compliance agent.
This individual is required for goods which are manufactured outside the EU or Northern Ireland and must be based in the EU or Northern Ireland.
They are effectively an official point of contact for product compliance and safety issues.
Some service providers are starting to provide responsible person apps, but these come at a cost, with different fees and categories for each product, alongside the added bureaucracy of new labelling requirements.
Such increased burdens are by their nature putting off many businesses from exporting, and as we approach the festive season, Brexit really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Alex Orr
Edinburgh
AS a political activist in the cause of emancipation from colonial and “regional” exploitation, I feel the need to take a winter vacation from remonstrating with both those who will not see, and those who are so demoralised they cannot see, the results of several centuries of an imperial mindset, followed by several decades of a neoliberal secular materialism.
Unfortunately so many of our fellow Scottish citizens, although they cannot see, can feel the psychological consequences of political failure. Across the land there is a spirit of distrust and disappointment in politicians and political process and a sense of powerlessness as passive victims of forces that appear beyond their individual control.
READ MORE: Nicola’s Sturgeon's leadership was a model of 'as if’ to build on
Hopes of a coherent unity of purpose and vision in the independence movement are lacking, and now the betrayal of a disingenuous Labour government as a follow-on from years of Tory corruption and incompetence has fostered what psychologists term “learned helplessness”.
Thus the deteriorating health statistics, the physical and particularly the mental distress tsunami and its resultant burden of disability in a low/no-growth economy. All of this against a background of consumer capitalism and the false promises of a “meritocracy”.
This is indeed a “winter of discontent” but I am ever hopeful that the increasing pain of living will reach a critical in mass in Scotland and the UK and the “people” will demand radical political and economic reform and take back their destiny from homegrown and global elites.
This process must be ignited in our individual hearts and result in each of us saying within ourselves “enough is enough”!
Until this happens en masse I can better spend my energies doing good works for the needy and shutting up for the time being – only for the time being!
Dr Andrew Docherty
Selkirk
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