Talking-up Scotland

South Lanarkshire has a target of building 1 000 new council house by 2021 supported by Scottish Government funding. According to Scottish Housing News:

‘South Lanarkshire’s approach to energy efficiency will continue across all future developments including the fabric of the buildings and the use of high-quality insulation, modern heating systems and boilers, and wherever possible, renewable energy sources.’

Also reported by Scottish Housing News, the Scottish Government is putting pressure on Borders Council to get a move on and to consider building many more to meet the extreme shortages in the area. Holyrood had identified a need for 916 but the council plans only 811.

http://www.scottishhousingnews.com/16920/councillors-agree-sites-for-hundreds-of-new-scottish-borders-homes/

This is all part of much larger Scottish Government plan for 2017 alone:

Scottish Government plan to approve more than 10 000 affordable new homes this year

Also, see these earlier reports to get the fuller picture:

Big increase in affordable housing supply down to Scottish Government investment

Big increase in affordable housing supply down to Scottish Government investment

The non-reporting of the Scottish Government’s commitment to affordable housing reflects the inability of our political journalists to highlight any good news coming out of Holyrood.

Commissioned by Mainstream Renewable Power, the company behind the huge Neart na Gaoithe (NnG) wind farm off the Fife coast, the Institute renowned for its right-wing Unionist leanings reported that the wind farm will:

create 2,000 construction jobs in Scotland over a four-year period.

generate the equivalent of 0.6% of Scotland’s GDP

generate £827.4 million over the lifetime of the project.

generate £382million across the country’s construction sector,

feed £440.2million into the service industries.

Create 236 jobs annually during its operational lifespan.

This clearly won’t do. Who wrote this? Don’t they know there are several other even bigger windfarms? What will they do for the Scottish economy? Sack them before those separatists get wind (😊) of this.

https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/148782/wind-farm-off-coast-fife-will-create-2000-construction-jobs-scotland-four-year-period-new-report-said/

Only Ireland’s Salmon seem to be more profitable for producers than Scottish salmon. Here are the main suppliers’ EBIT [Earnings before interest and taxes] per kg:

Ireland             3.40 euros

Scotland          3.10

Norway            2.50

Canada            2.35

Chile                1.45

Marine Harvest Scotland made 198 million euros in the Q2 of 2017, compared to 149 million in Q2 of 2016. That’s a very impressive growth rate in one year of 33%.

According to Marine Harvest Scotland who employ 700 staff on the farms and a further 500 in Rosyth where the fish is processed:

‘This performance, the highest ever for half year results, is largely due to bigger fish and a healthy market thanks to strong demand for salmon….The introduction of wrasse and lumpsuckers has helped reduce sea lice levels. This pioneering work will now be followed by a scaling up of the company’s production, with plans to invest £3.5million in farming cleaner fish. Other measures include the use of a thermolicer, skirts around the salmon farm nets, and hydrolicers, which remove lice from the environment with the help of gentle water pressure.’

This is, in part, explanation as to how Scotland produced 28% of the UK’s food and drink exports with only 8% of the population.

https://www.fishupdate.com/scottish-investment-pays-off-mh/

I know it’s tempting. He seems to be a really nice guy. His social policies are just what we want here too. Actually, we’ve got some of them already, without his help, remember that.

But, we’ve been through this before for nearly a century, falling for Labour leaders who we thought might deliver the kind of Scotland we now should know only independence can deliver. When they’re in government, they’re first and foremost beholden to the English electorate. I voted Labour until Kinnock under the same delusions. I won’t get fooled again [hear the Who song every time you read that?].

Kezia Dugdale, who of course really disnae like him has suggested Corbyn is ‘very open’ to ‘her’ idea of devolving issues like immigration and employment law through a distinct Brexit deal. Not surprisingly, he has since contradicted her in the old tradition of London Labour leaders telling the Scottish branch what’s what. He said it would be ’very, very difficult if not impossible.’ And that ‘UK-wide agreement was preferable.’ So that’s her telt.

He then went even further to reveal how Anglo-centric he is by saying Scotland couldn’t have a separate legal system when, as we all know, we already have one.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15498603.Corbyn_at_odds_with_Dugdale_over_Scottish_deal_on_Brexit/

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4342101/jeremy-corybn-left-red-faced-after-forgetting-england-and-scotland-have-separate-legal-systems/

This is the second huge discovery this year. It was only in May we heard that Hurricane Energy had been increasing their estimates from 600 million to 2 billion and now to 8 billion based on discoveries west of Shetland in just one month:

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

Now what seems to be a further billion barrels of recoverable oil has been found to the west of Shetland in the strangely named ‘Greater Lancaster Area.’

Suggesting that this is additional to the finds in May, it’s been described as ‘the largest undeveloped discovery’ of oil in UK waters.

Oil and Gas UK have said:

‘There are still up to 20bn barrels of oil and gas to go after in the UKCS [sic] and we believe that makes the basin a very positive investment prospect indeed.’

It seems Hurricane Energy’s success is due to concentrating on neglected geological formations known as ‘naturally fractured basement reservoirs’ and that these are common west of Shetland.

So, once more, here is evidence of massive energy wealth which would be available to an independent Scotland which by all the signs would soon be entirely self-sufficient on renewable energy sources by 2030 and so able to sell all the oil to the fast growing economies in Asia.

This is just one more indicator of how the GERS figures serve only to deceive and to undermine us.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/billion-barrels-recoverable-oil-found-off-coast-scotland/27/03/

http://www.electricscotland.com/business/THE_GREAT_DECEPTION_FINAL.pdf

http://www.oilofscotland.org/the_great_obfuscation_gers_2006.pdf

© http://www.theinformationarchives.com/Pterodactyl/

You’ll remember the awful violence in the Scottish Referendum campaign. No not the mass violent attacks by openly fascist groups on Yes supporters in George Square, the egg someone threw at Jim Murphy. According to MSP Neil Findlay’s new book reviewed in the National, Murphy was deliberately trying to wind up Yes supporters and hoped they’d do something newsworthy. The egg was the best he got. The culprit got 80 hours unpaid community service for his offence and hopefully lots of cups of tea with Tunnock’s teacakes for his efforts. Murphy got kicked out on his arse.

In his book, Findlay says of Murphy: [he] ‘hasn’t a principled bone in his body’. He says Murphy wanted independence supporters to ‘behave like a rowdy mob so undecided voters will be turned off by it.’

In reply, Murphy has said ‘Rrrrrraawwwwwwkkkkkk!!!!’

http://www.thenational.scot/politics/15498539.Jim_Murphy____wanted_Yes_mob_angry____during_indyref/?ref=twtrec

From news.gov.scot today:

The Scottish Government has allocated £2.5 million to 13 projects across Scotland designed to ‘improve employment support’ by ‘linking with health and social care, justice and housing services.’

This extract sums up the main idea behind the projects:

‘Funding will go to a mixture of projects including an approach in Fife which will increase employment outcomes for people suffering mental ill-health and an approach in North Lanarkshire to join up services for homeless residents who have recognised health, social care and housing support needs.’

Once more, I’m reminded that the SNP are trying their best within the constraints set by Westminster to make this the kind of country I want to live in. This is just one more of many initiatives which have some heart at their heart (nice catchphrase?) such as the compensation for the bedroom tax, the baby boxes and free care for the elderly all of which are gradually making Scotland more like Scandinavia and less like the USA which seems to be Westminster’s preferred direction of travel. Our superior NHS with its advance integration of health and social care and the recent signs such as our falling stillbirth rate all point to the even greater possibilities we’d have with greater autonomy.

‘NHS across UK has much to learn from Scotland?’ The King’s Fund told us this in 2013!

As NHS Scotland’s standards of care continue to exceed those of NHS England, the Scottish Government does not rest

Scottish stillbirth and early infant death rates lowest in the UK and approaching lowest in the world

https://news.gov.scot/news/improving-employment-support

Here’s what the Scottish Sun said:

‘It’s been complied [sic] for the best part of a quarter of a century, since it was invented by Tory Scottish Secretary Ian Lang as a stick with which to beat the SNP. He wanted to create a set of figures which would prove there was no possible economic case for independence and, quite frankly, he didn’t care how he did it. Back in the good old days GERS included everything, right down to Scotland’s share of running the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square because that’s a “national” resource for the benefit of everybody while the National Gallery of Scotland is just a little local outfit for the Jocks.’

It’s spot on politically as long as you stop reading there. The vampirish Lang did do just that but the GERs figures are of course compiled and not complied. Mind you, there’s a wee Freudian possibility there in that Lang was complying with his English masters’ wishes in arranging to compile the figures….complicated, complementary, complete fn tosh?

Here’s some really useful stuff on GERS the Sun didn’t (couldn’t) cover:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2017/08/24/25-of-the-26-gers-income-figures-are-estimates-and-not-the-real-figures/

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/08/25/gers-is-this-why-it-always-says-the-scottish-deficit-is-so-large/

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/1479567/snp-website-gers-numbers-figures/

I’m not suggesting here that the Sun’s writers are any more thick than those at BBC Scotland when it comes to making sense of GERS or the above criticisms from Prof Richard Murphy. So, well done the Scottish Sun? A for effort, E for grammar/spelling.

I wrote a few weeks ago about a solution to storing surplus energy produced by our already massive renewables capacity to extract hydrogen simply and cheaply and safely from water and to store the gas in tanks on unused oil rigs. It’s already being looked at seriously by the Germans so you know what that means:

Suddenly there’s a brilliant alternative to oil rig decommissioning costs. You can store Scotland’s surplus renewable electricity with it and it’s low-tech.

Now, already Aberdeen City Council has a fleet of hydrogen-powered vehicles and a storage facility at Cove. To increase awareness of hydrogen fuel cell technology and to attract young potential engineers and entrepreneurs into the field, the council and Hydrogenics, who run the refuelling station, have held a ‘hackathon’ involving 100 young inventors. The original piece in the Scottish Business News Network isn’t too clear just what the challenge was that the young inventors faced.  However, there were teams and a cup for the winning team. I have to assume that they had to come up with new ideas to exploit the technology or to improve in some way?

https://sbnn.co.uk/2017/08/28/hydrogen-hackathon-draws-young-inventors/