FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon has set the scene on how Scotland’s natural resources could be better managed in future in the next instalment of a series of independence papers.
Laying out more of the stall in the second of the publications, Ms Sturgeon asks where is Scotland’s £500 billion North Sea oil and gas sovereign wealth fund?
Such a fund doesn’t exist here, but it does in other countries like Norway, and they allow high-level investments to be made by the state to make the most of such resources.
Ms Sturgeon says that “the revenue generated from oil and gas reserves which could have been invested to generate a return for current and future generations, equalising wealth between generations, was allocated to current spending for shorter-term purposes”.
The FM said: “Other policy choices were available. Recognising the non-renewable nature of the benefits extractable oil and gas reserves bring, other countries implemented innovative policies to ensure that these resources provided lasting returns. Norway invested in a sovereign wealth fund, which at the end of 2021 stood at 12,340 billion kroner or over $1.3 trillion.
“By contrast, the Institute for Public Policy Research has estimated that: ‘If a fund had been created from the North Sea oil revenues in the 1980s, it would be worth over £500 billion [in 2018].’”
A lifeline islands airline service took the description to a new level when airline pilots helped save a kayaker in danger of being swept out to sea.
Jonathan Hinkles, the chief executive of Glasgow-based Loganair, says: “Taking off from Barra, our Twin Otter crew of flight LM452 to Glasgow were alerted to reports of a sea kayaker in distress. The kayaker had been blown far out to sea and was disorientated, but reported seeing the Twin Otter landing at Barra a short time earlier.
“Our pilots thus ‘re-traced their steps’ after take-off, flying the reciprocal bearings of the procedure they’d followed to land at Barra - and sure enough, soon spotted the kayaker waving vigorously.
“The location co-ordinates were passed on via the Barra Flight Information Service and our Twin Otter took up station flying orbits overhead to guide the Barra lifeboat and Coastguard to effect the kayaker’s rescue, before then setting course as normal for Glasgow.”
A broadside on the Conservatives by SNP MacNeil-led committee was entirely justified, says business editor Ian McConnell in his Called to Account column this week.
“Particularly notable was the declaration from committee chairman and Scottish National Party MP Angus Brendan MacNeil, as the report was published, that the UK Government ‘must level with the public’.”
The “rapid assembly of contenders for the post of Prime Minister following Boris Johnson’s grudging resignation ago might appear indecorous – the political corpse is hardly cold – but anything other than a swift transition risks plunging the UK economy through the thin ice upon which it already skates into deeply chilling waters”, writes business correspondent Kristy Dorsey in her analysis this week.
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