Talking-up Scotland

(c) lenlothian.com

The strength of the Scottish economy has been shown in numerous reports here, based on increased GDP in the First Quarter, four time that of rUK, lower unemployment than rUk consistently throughout the year, higher business confidence, big reductions in insolvencies, Scottish cities identified as best and second-best places to start a business in different surveys, increased exports and consistently positive balance of trade figures, new oil discoveries, record renewable energy output and even, more dolphins. I’ll leave you to search the site for evidence of these, this time.

Another obvious sign of good economic health is office space take-up. The Scottish Business News Network has reported on developments in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Edinburgh has exceeded the annual average, with two months still to go, by 15% on the previous year.

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/10/30/edinburgh-office-take-up-well-ahead-of-annual-average/

In Glasgow, demand for office space in 2017 has been lower than in Edinburgh, but research by JLL estate agents are predicting very high growth in Q4 and in 2018. See this from sbnn:

‘Office activity in Glasgow slowed in the three months from July to September due to a lack of new developments, according to new research by JLL. But with significant public-sector office deals expected to land in the final quarter of the year Glasgow’s office market could be set for a stellar 12 months well above five-year averages.’

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/10/27/calm-third-quarter-sets-up-storming-year-end-for-glasgow-office-market/

A survey undertaken by Good&Co in 2014 found quite marked differences between the Scots and rUK visitors to their site. Good&Co get around 200 000 visitors to their site per month (https://www.trafficestimate.com/good.co) and most of them complete a personality profile to enable the site to direct them toward careers or even specific companies. Here’s how they describe themselves:

‘Good&Co is an app that guides professionals towards meaningful careers by analyzing people’s personalities to find them their ideal company culture. Utilizing psychometric data, Good&Co has created forward-thinking, innovative tests that give you a personality profile and measure your compatibility with various companies.’ 

I was unable to find just how many Scots and rUK citizens were involved in this but Good&Co reported that they were able to confirm their findings. With around 2.5 million visitors per year, their sample is likely to be more than large enough though self-selecting and perhaps disproportionate to the base population sizes. See this diagram as illustration of the frequency of personality traits revealed by the two groups:

Here’s how Good&Co summed up

‘Good.Co’s regional profile of Scotland tells us that if Scotland were a person, s/he would best match the Advocate personality type: fair-minded, plain-speaking, just, stoic, and perceptive. The perfect type for a doctor, in fact, which is exactly what our job-matching algorithms recommended based on the averaged personality traits of our Scottish users.’

https://good.co/blog/scottish-independence-england-data/

I know that there is a lack of transparency in this research but does it ring true?

(c) localenergyscotland.org

On the site of the former John Brown’s shipyard and as part of the £250 million Queen’s Quay regeneration project, heat pump technology will extract heat from the waters of the Clyde to heat local homes and businesses. It seems, Lord Kelvin suggested the idea first in 1852 but it’s still being referred to as ‘pioneering.’ That’s been a very long ‘flash to bang’ to get ‘a head of steam up’ as those of us still using metaphors from the ages of sail and steam might say. If it works well there will be more built.

In Energy Voice today, the system is explained:

‘Though pioneering, Heat pump technology works in a similar way to an air conditioner or refrigerator transferring air from one place to another; heat pumps usually draw heat from the cooler external air or from the ground and convert it into warm air which is then transferred to another location, such as a house or office block.’

Though quite a small project, in itself,  it’s another in what is becoming a flood of renewables projects across Scotland, large and small, which suggest 100% sustainable renewables energy generation is possible well before the target of 2030. If you search this blog for ‘renewables’, you’ll find more than 50 reports (!) including this one:

Scotland’s energy 100% renewable by 2030?

https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/154502/heat-energy-pumped-clyde-river-warm-scottish-town/

I’ve reported several times this year on good news from Dundee. Usually it has to do with technological breakthroughs or other innovations. Here are three from the list:

Silver medal and second in list of best places to start a new business 2017, it’s….. Edinburgh? No, it’s Dundee. Sit down Edinburgh.

‘University of Dundee is UK’s highest ranked institution for influencing innovation’

Teckle! Dundee Good News Special

Now a new report from Clarivate Analytics has named Dundee University as the world’s most influential research centre for pharmaceuticals research for the period 2006 to 2016. Its main impact has been on research into cancers, arthritis and diabetes. That’s an astonishing achievement for a university in a city the size of Dundee. Edinburgh University also made the top ten list but Dundee came above massive institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California in Berkeley.

http://www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/news/2017/oct/27/dundee-named-world-centre-pharmaceutical-innovation

But Dundee is not just a successful city of technology and science, it has been named a ‘hot destination’ by the Wall Street Journal and a ‘cool’ place to visit by GQ magazine. Perhaps confusing for the older reader, hot and cool are pretty much the same thing in this sense.

The Wall Street Journal article said:

‘A coastal college town, Dundee has emerged as Scotland’s coolest city (see the old public library turned underground club). In 2018 the V&A Museum of Design will debut as the centrepiece of a $1.5 billion transformation of the faded riverfront. Designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the new V&A will celebrate the country’s unsung design heritage – from jute to Minecraft.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-to-travel-in-2018-from-madagascar-to-scotlands-coolest-city-1508859864

GQ magazine headlined their piece: ‘Why Dundee is becoming Britain’s coolest little city.’

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/why-dundee-is-the-coolest-little-city-in-britain

Around 8 billion barrels are thought to lie in the fields west of Shetland. See:

Estimates of Scotland’s oil reserves West of Shetland now massively increased to around 8 billion barrels! ‘A super-resource now on the cards.’

French oil giant, Total, began production from two of the fields months ago and their third quarter profits have soared leading to a 40% increase from £1.5 billion in 2016 to £2.1 billion in 2017. Petroleum Revenue Tax was formerly charged at 50% but fell to 35% in January 2016 and was abolished in the March 2016 budget after aggressive lobbying by the oil industry. During the same period Norway, and all of the other oil-producing countries continued to tax oil production as before. Only the UK made a loss in 2016. See this graph for Shell:

Why only the UK? Professor Cumber and Business for Scotland re-told a story that had already been told in 2016 by the International Transport Workers’ Federation and reported in Tax Justice:

‘New analysis of the UK’s North Sea oil and gas suggests that the combination of tax giveaways by the government, and aggressive avoidance by multinationals, means that the country may actually be subsidising the extraction of its natural resources. A new report published today by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) sets out a series of shocking statistics on the UK’s failure to obtain an appropriate share of its own resource wealth. Among them, these stand out:

• In 2014, UK consumers paid 6 times more tax on petrol, excluding VAT, than the North Sea oil and gas industry paid on all taxes related to production.
• Chevron’s effective tax rate in 2014 on earnings from North Sea production was 5.4%; statutory tax rates (of various types) on oil and gas should have totalled 61-82%.
• In 2014, 3 (Shell, BP & Total) of the top 4 North Sea producers produced more than £4.3 billion worth of oil and gas and received over £300 million in net tax refunds.

The ITF argue that while the oil sector has successfully lobbied for and won huge tax breaks from the UK government, the companies involved continued to pursue aggressive tax avoidance as standard practice. The Chevron report (see graphic for UK structure, click to enlarge) provides a detailed case study of tax dodging tactics which are replicated by others, particularly Nexen – on which the Times had a frontpage splash yesterday, using ITF analysis to show that the Chinese government-backed company received tax credits of £2 billion.’

http://www.taxjustice.net/2016/08/25/uks-north-sea-oil-revenues-giving-away/

These giveaways cannot be undone now but we can begin properly taxing the remaining billions of barrels and putting the money in a trust for Scotland’s future. With only a fraction of Scotland’s oil reserves, Norway has tucked away £1 trillion!

(c) mycelebrityandi.com

The Brent crude benchmark has hit $60. At 16:28 it was sitting at $60.10.

https://www.energyvoice.com/marketinfo/154493/brent-crude-benchmark-hits-60/

In afternoon trading in London, yesterday, the international oil benchmark hit $60.53 per barrel as a result of strong and growing demand as the world economy grows at its fastest in several years and the OPEC/Russia supply cuts hold.
https://www.ft.com/content/8d847ee0-bb26-11e7-8c12-5661783e5589

This is likely to be only the beginning of price increases as world shortages soar. See these:

Investors already betting on $100 per barrel oil in 2018? Indyref2 should be a very different story

Hammering home the point that oil is no burden for Scotland: US supplies fall as world-wide demand begins to soar.

As Scotland moves quickly to 100% renewable energy sustainability and reliability by 2020, these prices combined with new oil finds west of Shetland and new technologies extracting greater amounts from the North Sea, Scotland should be a very wealthy country. See these:

Another familiar type of headline here: With only 8% of the population, Scotland generates 24% of the UK’s renewable electricity and surges toward 100% sustainability well before 2030.

£290 billion of tax revenue still in the North Sea and much more to the west of Shetland

Of course, unless we push ahead with and win an independence referendum by 2020 or 2021 at the latest, much of this wealth will go to Westminster or even be untaxed in an attempt to weaken the case for independence by concealing the potential revenue. See this:

http://thenational.scot/news/15616864.Westminster__may_well_be_giving_away_Scotland___s_oil_for_free___says_energy_professor/

A recent YouGov poll showed that most Scots believe we’d be worse of if we’d voted for independence in 2014. This shows the power of the propaganda from our mainstream Unionist media to fool the majority of Scots into thinking the opposite of what I have just shown to be the case. Please share this widely.

Please let Spain not descend into the horrors of civil war. Madrid must pull back before a single death leads to a chain reaction of murder and revenge and escalates, out of control, into events like those some there can still remember and who have told their children and grandchildren of them.

 

I’m small beer in this which is OK because I do like a small beer. The best I’ve had is 9 707 readers for a story. I tend to average nearer 2 000. However, pro-independence blog Wings over Scotland and Radio Scotland’s Good Mourning Scotland (GMS) seem like they may be getting very close in audience size. In fact, I’m going to wager Wings has pulled clear and GMS is spiralling downward to utter insignificance. First, Wings over Scotland claim:

‘Wings had just over 300,000 unique readers in June, despite taking the last couple of weeks off ourselves, bringing the monthly average readership for the first half of 2017 to 346,226. That’s 55,532 up on the same period last year, or a 19% increase.’

https://wingsoverscotland.com/category/stats/

In an effort to establish the audience for GMS, Wings wrote to ask what it was only to be told the Freedom of Information Act didn’t really cover BBC audience figures even though citizens are forced to fund it. Wings commented:

‘On one level, we suppose it’s comforting to know that the BBC holds all of its patrons in contempt, not just those who support Scottish independence. It’s less uplifting to realise that the Freedom of Information Act only applies to the broadcaster in an abstract theoretical sense, even though citizens are forced to fund it under penalty of law whether they watch its output or not. That seems to us to veer terribly close to “taxation without representation”, particularly in the light of the fact that fewer than half of Scots feel the BBC is serving them adequately in its coverage of news and current affairs – the only part of the UK where that’s the case. (61% of English people, for example, are happy with it.) We suspect those feelings are reflected in the viewing statistics for the Corporation’s flagship Scottish political programmes, and that that’s the reason the BBC is so shy about revealing them. But since it appears that those numbers are an impenetrable state secret held above the law of the land, we’ll never know for sure.’

https://wingsoverscotland.com/none-of-your-damn-business/

So, in the absence of official statistics, I’ve had to scrabble around piecing together the evidence. We do know from days when they felt less threatened that GMS lost 75 000 listeners in one year between 2008 and 2009. It slumped by 16.5% in that one year from 455 000 to 380 000. This coincided with the first SNP government in 2007 and recent growth of SNP support.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/radio-scotland-losing-1-500-listeners-a-week-1-789294

We know also that BBC Radio Scotland altogether has slumped by 35% between 2011 and 2016, from 1 350 000 to 901 000.

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2017/10/26/bbc-radio-scotland-is-in-terminal-decline-with-35-fewer-viewers-in-only-7-years/

So, unless GMS is beating the trend for the rest of BBC Radio Scotland, we can perhaps assume a comparable slump from 2009 at 380 000, down by around 35%, to at best 250 000 in 2016. I think that’s generous in that I’ve left out any change from 2009 to 2011 for which I have no figures at all. I know there are a lot of ifs and buts in there but the BBC’s refusal to reveal the figures officially makes me think I might be on the right track and, on that basis, Wings is bigger than GMS.

In August, the Institute for Fiscal Studies released a report which showed that Scotland is second only to South-East England, out of eleven regions surveyed, in terms of median income with much of the improvement coming under an SNP administration.

Now, from the ONS: Statistical bulletin: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2017 provisional and 2016 revised results, described as ‘the most detailed and comprehensive source of earnings information in the UK’ we read:

‘The strong rise of earnings in Scotland can be seen in Figure 12, which plots an index of growth from 1997 for the constituent countries of the UK, and London.

Notice in the above, increases in Scottish earnings begin to accelerate away from the other regions from 2011 in a period of SNP majority administration. During the preceding years of Labour/LibDem coalitions they fail to keep up with those for England and London.  Figure 11 shows Scotland in third place in the UK.

Figure 11: Median full-time gross weekly earnings and percentage change from previous year, by region, UK, April 2017

Figure 13 shows Scottish regions in the middle to upper range and none in the lowest range of income. Overall, on the basis of an admittedly broad-brush picture, does this suggest a slightly more equal society? I’ve already reported on the wider benefits of more equal societies at: Would Nicola Sturgeon’s fairer and more equal Scotland be a more productive one too?

Figure 13: Median full-time gross weekly earnings by place of work, Great Britain, April 2017

Local authority districts

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2017provisionaland2016revisedresults#regional-earnings

More evidence for the Fraser of Angleterre Institute, of Scotland’s ‘fragile economy’?

I wrote a piece today properly representing the findings of Audit Scotland’s survey of NHS Scotland at:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2017/10/26/despite-massive-increases-in-demand-nhs-scotland-maintains-performance-levels-extremely-close-to-the-most-rigorous-of-targets-and-patient-satisfaction-is-at-an-all-time-high-audit-scotland-say/

Some readers wrote to say how disgusted they had been by Good Morning Scotland’s biased, pro-Unionist misrepresentation of the survey findings. I can’t listen for health reasons.

However, none of this may matter for much longer as the audiences for BBC Radio Scotland are clearly in terminal decline. Leaving aside the dubious use of counting those who listen for as little as 5 minutes, here are the figures

Q2 2011          1 350 00

Q2 2012          959 000

http://newsnet.scot/archive/bbc-chiefs-hit-back-after-radio-scotland-branded-a-national-disgrace/

Q3 2015          948 000

Q3 2016          901 000

Q3 2017          870 000

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20171026/282179356333765

480 000 in only 7 years! That’s 35% or an average fall of 5% per year. At that rate, they’ll be smaller than many local or independent stations such as Capital which has 544 000.