© theconstructionindex.co.uk

In 2016, STV reported:

‘The SNP Scottish Government has built or refurbished twice as many schools as the previous administration, Holyrood researchers have found.’

During the SNP administrations from 2008 to 2015, they built 607 schools while during the Labour administrations from 1999 to 2007, only 308 were built. The data was obtained by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Spice). I think this kind of information captures perfectly the advantages of government by a party independent of a London-based HQ.

https://stv.tv/news/politics/1363964-snp-built-more-schools-than-previous-administration/

Now, the SNP have committed to a further 116 new schools in this administration, spending £1.8 billion, despite Westminster cut-backs. Included in this will be:

• Jedburgh Intergenerational Campus will replace Jedburgh Grammar School, Parkside and Howdenburn Primary Schools, in the Scottish Borders
• Sighthill Community Campus will replace St Stephen’s Primary School and St Kevin’s Primary School in Glasgow
• Underbank Primary School and Walston Primary School in South Lanarkshire will both be replaced 

Notably, at least one new school project is being delivered in every local authority area in Scotland. Remember also, the SNP-led government has had to pick up the bill to repair the schools with collapsing walls built under Labour’s PFI scheme.

https://news.gov.scot/news/funding-for-new-schools-1

Combine this with the fact that the Scottish government is building twice as many affordable homes per capita than the Westminster government and you are again reminded of what governments should be doing.

SNP government spending on affordable housing to be more than twice, per head of population, than that of Tory government

© orkneyferries.co.uk

We’ve already seen the chaos the SNP has caused [sarcasm alert] by promoting tourism in the Western Isles. There have been huge cuts for vehicle passengers, like Oban to Mull, from £56.65 to £16.45 and Mallaig to Skye, from £29.05 to £12.20. Scottish ministers have since been blamed for promoting overcrowding chaos on Skye. Now the Aberdeen to the Northern Isles ferry charges are to be cut by 40% to promote tourism. Will there be chaos there too with horses of tourists blocking the roads?

Am I missing something? Don’t the islanders want more tourists spending more money? Shouldn’t the local businesses invest in bigger car parks themselves and set-up attractive guided bus tours so the tourists leave their cars in the car parks? Isn’t the Scottish Government doing just what it should be doing; stimulating rural economies?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/09/skye-islanders-call-for-help-with-overcrowding-after-tourism-surge

http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/15068-minister-confirms-big-cut-in-ferry-fares

 

© pinterest.co.uk

You may think I’m scraping the barrel with this story….with my teeth, but there is, it has to be said a shortage of suitable stories for my blog at the moment. So, this from Yougov four days ago and strangely inflated by Fife Today’s report on the 9^th August, is todays addition to the evidence for the Scots being having stronger communitarian tendencies. You know the other things – free care for the elderly, bus passes, no tuition fees and the bedroom tax neutered.

So, it’s no surprise that we say we should slip more under the pillow of bairns traumatised by tooth extraction. According to Yougov, the UK average is 88p while the Scottish one is £1. I don’t like the new £1 coin, do you? But then, I never like change (joke pinched from the Edinburgh Festival)

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/08/18/brits-believe-tooth-fairy-should-pay-average-88p-t/

However, according to Fife Today’s unattributed survey, the Scottish average paid is £1.60 per tooth while the UK average is £1.49.

Maybe it’s two different surveys; one based on what respondents say we should give and one based on what we say we do give?

Either way, more damning evidence against the Union.

http://www.fifetoday.co.uk/lifestyle/tooth-fairies-pay-scottish-children-an-average-of-1-60-per-tooth-1-4525800

Using biofuel from from ‘draff’, the residue of husks after fermentation of the grain and the residual waste liquid ‘pot ale’, a car was driven round Edinburgh in July.

‘Whisky-fuelled car makes first journey’ Calm down it’s not the good stuff!

Now, a Scottish scientist, Douglas Martin who is only 26, has found another use by growing algae from Whisky ‘co-products’ and feeding the omega 3 rich algae to fish. The Edinburgh-based Scientist has won an award including £5 000 to help grow his company MiAlgae. This is, I gather, an example of the ‘circular economy’. I don’t know why it’s not just called recycling. Here’s how it works:

‘We use other industries’ waste, create microalgae from it, whilst also cleaning the co-products. Our process is the embodiment of the circular economy.’

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/08/15/young-scottish-scientist-wins-low-carbon-entrepreneurship-award-shell-algae-start/

The global seaweed industry is worth more than $5 billion per annum. That was news to me I must admit. Although I know there is a seaweed industry in Scotland, especially on the west coast, where it’s used in food, cosmetics and in fertilisers. There was of course a lucrative kelp industry in the Western Isles in the not-so-distant past and the Scottish Government has just issued guidelines on ‘Building a commercial seaweed industry’ in Scotland:

https://news.gov.scot/news/building-a-commercial-seaweed-industry

The main risks to the industry however are disease and pests which can have devastating effects on the crop and the dependent population often in developing parts of the world with fragile economies.

So, Dr Elizabeth Cottier-Cook of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) is to lead a project which aims to find solutions to the pest infestations and the disease but also to train local people in identifying and preventing the disease.

https://www.sams.ac.uk/news/sams-news-globalseaweed-launch.html

© heraldscotland.com

We’ve already seen the linked indicators of increasing health in the Scottish economy in demand for office and industrial space, in business confidence, in increased employment and in increased starting salaries:

‘Staggering’ 175% increase in Edinburgh office take-up is further evidence of booming Scottish economy

As economy grows faster in Scotland than in England, rents for industrial space climb faster here too

Nope, still no recession, Fraser of Allander ‘Institute’: Scottish employment climbs to record high while unemployment and inactivity falls over the quarter.

Scottish businesses showing signs of greater health than those in the rest of the UK

Good news for the Scottish economy again! Big rise in permanent jobs and starting salaries climb in Scotland

Predictably, house prices are starting to rise at a faster rate than in England and Wales too. According to Your Move and reported in the Insider, prices went up 4.6% in the last year, in Scotland, as opposed to only 3.3% in England and Wales. Bear in mind the English figures include the still booming South-East of England.

http://www.insider.co.uk/news/house-price-growth-scotland-outpacing-11007981

 

Why the UK’s geology means fracking will never come to Scotland and should never have been allowed in England because it’s 55 000 000 years too late!

Despite support for fracking falling to an all-time low of 17%, the UK government is pushing ahead and overriding the objections of local communities and local authorities. The health risks are well known but UK politicians insist standards will be higher in the UK than they have been in the US where we’ve seen several disasters. See, for example:

‘How 10 Years of Fracking Has Been a Disaster for Our Water, Land and Climate’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margie-alt/how-10-years-of-fracking_b_9806768.html

However, there is another issue rarely addressed and that is the general unsuitability of the UK’s geology compared to that of parts of the USA. A quite extended and complex piece from Oil and Gas People yesterday is summarised here. The link to the full piece is below.

I think these two extracts sum up the differences:

1. The most successful US shale areas, such as the Marcellus, Barnett, Haynesville and Bakken, all lie at depths and temperatures that mean they are ready to expel their oil and gas when fracked. The basins in which these occur are primarily in relatively stable, undeformed areas away from the edges of active tectonic plates, which geologists refer to as “intracratonic” basins. They are characterised by continuous layers of rock with only gentle dips and few fractures or major faults. This all aids subsurface imaging, gas/oil detection and the directional drilling needed for shale exploration.
2. A cursory look at the geological map of the UK shows a very different proposition. The whole land mass has been significantly uplifted by a chain of geological events that started some 55m years ago with the upward rise of a plume of magma under Iceland. This helped break the tectonic plate in two, pushing Greenland and North America in one direction and the eastern segment containing the British Isles in the other, forming the Atlantic Ocean in between…. In short, even where a shale source in the UK may have high organic content and thick and favourable mineralogy, the complex structure of the basins will be detrimental to ultimate recovery….As a result, the opportunity has been overhyped and reserve estimates remain unknown.

So, with hesitation, as non-geologist, I think what the report is saying is that the UK’s geology is too fractured, folded and complex for easy access to large economically viable deposits and that the rock itself often does not have a sufficiently high organic content there to be extracted.

Even considering UK basins said to hold large deposits such as in Lancashire and West Lothian, these rock formations were deformed, not for the first time, 290 million years ago making their structures even more complex and fractured. The report concludes that for UK shale oil extraction, it’s 55 million years too late!

https://www.oilandgaspeople.com/news/14910/there-may-be-a-huge-flaw-in-uk-fracking-hopes/

From a piece in Insider yesterday:

‘Strong demand for whisky, salmon and beer has lifted UK exports by 8.5 per cent to a record high of £10.2bn in the first half of the year.’

Also, [UK] Food Minister George Eustice said:

‘These encouraging figures show that the UK’s high-quality foods and high standards are sought after around the world.’

There was no mention, of the enormous and disproportionate role that Scottish food and drink plays in all this success. See:

With only 8% of the population, Scotland accounts for more than 28% of UK food and drink exports. Too wee to survive on our own?

Scottish Government awards 13 firms £3.5m in new grants to maintain push for growth in food and drink sales

As Scotland massively increases its number of breweries and distilleries, food and drink start-ups here have had a higher survival rate and have grown at a faster rate than in the rest of the UK

Once more, the evidence for full autonomy shouts out loud.

http://www.insider.co.uk/news/soaring-whisky-salmon-sales-help-11008755

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has just released a report which shows that Scotland is second only to South-East England, out of eleven regions surveyed, in terms of median income.

Figure 3.9 from the report shows the current level of inequality between the UK regions and countries, after housing costs are taken into account. You can see the dramatic effect housing costs have in incomes in Scotland, the South-East and London giving Scotland the second-highest median income in the UK.

Figure 3.10 below shows how Scotland has caught up and surpassed most of England since the 1970s. According to the report, most of this progress happened in the last two decades. We can safely assume that the greater autonomy in economic decision-making will have been the major factor in this post-devolution period. Though this cannot be proved based on the data presented, I suspect the greater competence and greater willingness of the SNP to divert from and to introduce more radical innovations than the UK government will have accelerated this in the last decade, under their rule.

Regardless of any explanation, this is good news. I appreciate that these data tell us nothing about inequality within the regions and countries though the Scottish Government building twice as many affordable homes per capita than in England will have helped.

https://www.researchonline.org.uk/sds/search/download.do?ref=B48870

 

© orkneyharbours.com

The growing demand from Asia, warnings of shortages and the now repeated predictions of significantly raised prices for crude between 2018 and 2020, of up to $100 per barrel, have clearly prevented the winding down of Orkney’s Flotta terminal and preserved 280 jobs. The terminal is now quoted in the Energy Voice article yesterday as likely to be in operation ‘for a long time to come’. That last phrase tells you they know what’s coming.

Just four years ago it was expected to be in the process of winding down by now but developments since then have changed all that and it is still handling 100 000 barrels per day.

A major factor had been the Canadian-owned Nexen company’s Eagle Field which has been supplying the terminal since 2014, but it seems likely that future prospects are based on the above three trends reported here:

Scottish oil in new and much increased demand from Asia ‘like never before!’

Independent Scotland’s oil wealth is assured as Aramco chief predicts huge shortages

Will Scotland’s oil hit $100 (or more?) a barrel again after 2020?

Soaring oil prices will surely play a part in Indyref2? In 2020?

https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/north-sea/147868/flotta-terminal-enjoying-renaissance-coming-back-brink/