The case long argued by the Scottish Government against the Treasury, through industry regulator Ofgem, holding on to income from the Fossil Fuel Levy which rightly belonged to Scotland, appears to have been won.
The news follows a constructive initial meeting between First Minister, Alex Salmond and Cabinet Secretary for Finance, John Swinney, with Prime Minister, David Cameron and Scottish Secretary, Danny Alexander.
We understand that later today the Prime Minister will start the process which will release to Scotland £185 million, part of revenue raised through a tax on the North Sea oil and gas industry, the entirety of which has been held in an Ofgem account.
The previous Labour government, in its bad tempered and vindictive relations with Scotland, had refused outright to distribute this revenue appropriately.
A spokesperson for the Scottish Government says that the £185m Scottish fossil fuel levy can only be spent in Scotland, and that: ‘releasing it as an addition to Scotland’s budget could help support thousands of low carbon jobs in Scotland’s renewable energy industry’.
The intention is to deploy the money in developing Scotland’s renewable energy capability. Yesterday saw the publication of an independent report, the Offshore Valuation Study, calculating that the Scottish offshore renewable resources could generate over 200GW of electricity.
At the moment, at any one time, Scotland uses 6GW of electricity so the potential economic contribution of renewable energy generation cannot be underestimated.
And what about the Council Tax relief ( a budgetted constituent of Scotland’s block grant) which the Labour treasury made claet that it would withhold from Scotland if the Scottish Government decided to collect a Local Income tax rather thant he hopelessly unfair Council Tax?
I suspect that Scotland is about to find a number of home truths about the last Labour government, not least the huge burden of debt left on PFI projects which Labour boasted of building but didn’t pay for. By 2014 paying this debt will be costing £1billion per year which will be taken out of already stretched Scottish health and education budgets.
In years to come people will look back and wonder at how utterly useless the Scottish press has been in telling Scotland how ill served they were by voting Labour but as the “Scottish” press is mainly not Scottish at all that might include the clues.
I’m afraid the potential bonanza in renewable energy from Scotland is just another reason why bankrupt Britain must hang on to Scotland at all costs. We are already, through oil revenues, providing the collateral for the moutains of borrowings Labour just lumbered UK with.
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That , of course, should read “clear” not “claet”.
Now that Labour is out of office are we going to find out why Alistair Darling “flipped” his house four times with a cost to the public purse of over £120,000.
Or, indeed, why the MP for Argyll and Bute has his second home a stone’s throw from his main home.
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