Firstly, following their contortions regarding the ‘bringing it on’ or otherwise of a referendum, Labour spokespeople have been spinning frantically that while they support a referendum - it's the SNP which doesn't want an immediate vote, but that anyway, the SNP's proposed question would be unacceptable, so they won't commit to supporting a bill in any case.

Labour has yet to say what would, in its collective view (assuming such a thing exists right now), constitute an acceptable form of wording for the question. Now that the Electoral Commission is happy to get involved, though, including over the wording of the question, Labour really is running out of excuses not to back whatever form of words emerges.

Secondly, and potentially even more significant, is that if the Electoral Commission were to oversee the referendum at the request of the Scottish Government, both sides would then be subject to spending limits. Now, Wendy Alexander's erratic nature notwithstanding, who would have thought a year ago that an SNP minority government would have looked this likely to get a majority in parliament for an independence vote, far less be able to make sure that the resulting campaign couldn't be drowned in floods of cash from South of the Border?

That, my friends, looks like a bit of a result for the SNP. It also looks like Douglas Fraser has underplayed what would have been one of the political scoops of the year. Ah well…

Minimum Rage

There was a debate in the Commons on child poverty in Scotland at the beginning of May. As you might expect with child poverty, everyone was very much against it. However, in the course of the debate, labour Minister Anne MacGuire claimed that the SNP hadn’t voted for the National Minimum Wage when it came before Parliament in 1998.

This didn't tally with my recollection, so I went back to check. And lo and behold, would you Adam and Eve it, she wasn’t being entirely straight with us! The SNP had voted for the bill in earlier stages, but when it came to the 3rd reading on 9 March 1998, as the bill was due to be rubber stamped, it would seem that it wasn't only the SNP MPs who were elsewhere. According to the list for the division [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199798/cmhansrd/vo980309/debtext/80309-79.htm#80309-79_div194] , the following Honourable Members were absent also:

Let's see... in no particular order, there was no Anne Begg, Jimmy Hood, Tony Worthington, Tom Clarke, Rosemary MacKenna, Brian Wilson, Russell Browne, Ernie Ross, Adam Ingram, Gavin Strang, Malcolm Chisholm, Linda Clark, Nigel Griffiths, Michael Connarty, Mohammed Sarwar, Maria Fyfe... right, that's enough - I'm getting bored now.

But not so bored so as to miss the following. There was no Donald Dewar, and no Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary of the day either. Nor was there any sign of present Chancellor Alastair Darling. Or for that matter, a couple of characters by the name of Tony Blair and, er, Gordon Brown. Let alone the newly elected MP for Stirling, one [ahem] Anne McGuire!

Now, I'm sure they all had good reasons for not being there. In that spirit, can Labour people please stop using this exceptionally silly jibe to try and damage the SNP? If I was a parent of one of the 20% of Scottish children currently living in poverty, I'm not sure I'd be very impressed by such transparent and ludicrous attempts to point-score.

An Invisible Offshore Giant

What is it about the oil industry that causes many otherwise sentient minds to shut up shop? To some, North Sea Oil has been about to dry up imminently for the past 30 years. To others, it would have been ‘selfish’ to see the revenues as being anything other than British. Some, meanwhile, prefer a zero sum view that because a resource is finite, no benefit can arise from its use.

Ill-informed negativity masquerading as insight and wisdom isn’t only a feature of Scottish politics, but with oil and gas, it seems to be the default position for many. Although the wealth brought by the North Sea is clear to anyone who works in the industry, its economic significance has routinely been played down, leaving many in Scotland with a false impression of how big the industry actually is.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this is because with one or two very obvious exceptions, the onshore signs of the industry are few and far between for the majority of Scots. It’s simply never become part of our iconography in the way that  Ravenscraig or Clyde shipyards did – remarkable, when you consider that the offshore industry is worth something like a sixth and a fifth of total Scottish economic activity.

Figures from the UK Offshore Operators Association show that in 2006, the industry invested more than £5.5 billion in the North Sea; spent a further £5.5 billion on operations; and contributed £9 billion in direct taxation to the Exchequer. It employed, either directly or indirectly, some 480,000 people across the whole UK – with 380,000 jobs related to domestic production and a further 100,000 to the export of oilfield goods and services.

That latter number is of particular significance to Scotland. Thanks to the experience gained over the past 40 years, Scotland is now a major provider of oilfield goods and services throughout the world, with exports growing at 10% per annum and worth some £4bn every year. Like financial services, this is another Scottish industry with a truly global reach.

But it's not just onshore that our visibility of this giant is restricted. When it comes to UK economic data, North Sea revenues are always included in overall UK accounts, but  excluded from the Scottish accounts as 'Extra Regio'. This means that when a Scotland shorn of oil and gas revenues is compared with a UK figure which does include these revenues, Scotland is made to look relatively less prosperous than she actually is.

One of the most flagrant examples comes when measuring the size of the Scottish public sector. We’re often told that Scotland enjoys Scandinavian levels of public spending, yet pays only UK levels of taxation. The statistic used to back this up is that Scottish public spending exceeds 50% of GDP, while UK spending is sitting at 43% - a statistic from which we are then invited to believe, entirely falsely, that the Scottish public sector is uniquely inefficient and further, that Scottish public spending is being subsidised from elsewhere in the UK.

Let’s leave aside the fact that even if resources were being transferred to Scotland by the Treasury, present UK debt levels mean it would be being done with money borrowed internationally. Let’s also leave aside for a moment the fact that with 1/12 of the UK population being spread over 1/3 of the UK landmass, it’s always going to cost more to deliver the same quality of government services in Scotland than it would in more densely populated parts of the UK.

When you include the 90% plus share of North Sea revenues which would accrue to a Scottish Treasury, Scottish spending isn’t above 50% of GDP – it’s 41% - lower than the equivalent UK figure. In fact, pull the same stunt of removing those North Sea revenues out of UK accounts completely and the UK would have failed even to meet the Maastricht Eurozone convergence debt criteria from 2003/04 onwards.

It was in 1999 that the late Donald Dewar stood before the Scottish Grand Committee and intoned gravely that the $10 barrel of oil would be with us ‘for the foreseeable future’. Today, with greater competition for resources and increasing consumer demand, high energy prices and the challenges which flow look like they are here to stay. With our surfeit of renewables potential, and with as much to come from the North Sea as has already been extracted, Scotland is almost uniquely well placed to ride out the transition to this new world of energy insecurity.

We’re looking now to the second age of the North Sea, founded not on the prodigious rates of extraction of the early 1980's, but based on the high prices which make development of smaller resources worthwhile. However, the capital needed to maintain this success is both finite and highly mobile. To make the most of the remaining opportunities in the North Sea, government is going to have to focus on how to maintain an environment that makes Scotland at least as attractive to investors as other fields throughout the world.

Labour, with little or no affinity for the industry or those who work in it be they 'fat-cat' or 'roughneck', has only ever seen it as a convenient source of cash when the books won't balance. A Scottish Government could never afford to be so cavalier. This surely bodes better for the long-term future of the industry than the erratic behaviour of Whitehall debt junkies, desperate only for their next fix of corporation tax revenues.