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12.03.2026 07:00
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Emmanuel Macron, talking recently about electricity interconnections with Spain. A reality check for anyone who thinks the EU would be desperate to plug into an independent Scotland…
Liz Smith asking the questions.
Giving evidence yesterday to Holyrood’s Finance and Public Administration Committee, Shona Robison came close to admitting that she has set public spending on an unsustainable path. She does appear to acknowledge that a great many chickens will come home to roost in the next parliament.
The new Chair of the Board was giving evidence yesterday to the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.
Things are looking up at Ferguson Marine after they realised that it might be a good idea to have more people on the board with experience of shipbuilding. If only someone had thought of this before.
He was giving evidence this morning to the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee.
The extraordinary moment where the new CEO of Ferguson Marine reveals that the Glen Sannox needs replacement propellers because the original design wasn’t tested in water.
Clip is from this morning’s Finance & Public Administration Committee evidence session with the Permanent Secretary. Craig Hoy asking the questions.
Scot Gov civil servants can refuse to work from their offices without disciplinary consequences, and the agreement that civil servants would try to come in 2 days a week was conditional on attendance not being monitored. 🤯
Scot Gov yesterday snuck out a “written authority” for the purchase of Ardrossan Harbour. This is an exchange of letters in which a senior civil servant states that an action cannot be justified on value for money grounds, and a Scot Gov minister directs them to proceed anyway.
Remarkable coincidence that inconvenient news about ferries always seems to be published on a Friday. The full exchange can be found here:
Scot Gov yesterday snuck out a “written authority” for the purchase of Ardrossan Harbour. This is an exchange of letters in which a senior civil servant states that an action cannot be justified on value for money grounds, and a Scot Gov minister directs them to proceed anyway.
If the SNP wasn’t discombobulated enough by the Danish pivot back to drilling for oil & gas, we now learn that Denmark (along with six other EU nations) is potentially going to host French nuclear weapons. Head-spinning news for Lesley Riddoch.
Remarkable. Scot Gov is paying Ipsos MORI £40k to write a literature review on wealth taxes because the civil service in Scotland cannot be relied upon to produce politically impartial analysis. I don’t doubt this is true, but I didn’t expect them to come out and just say it.
Wind and solar are important sources of power and the latter in particular may yet prove transformational. But they are not a vehicle for Scottish or even British enrichment for the very simple and persuasive reason that renewable energy may be sourced from anywhere. Oil is valuable because it is rare; sun and wind are useful precisely because they are not. That helps explains why the claims made by Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson that Scotland and Britain could be "the Saudi Arabia of renewables" were just hot air. Renewable energy is a low return on capital sector and also, still, an expensive one.
Bracingly accurate stuff, understood by hardly anyone in Scottish politics. (And by absolutely nobody in the SNP or Scottish Greens).
And if you want a fuller explanation of these points, this is a good place to start:
Wind and solar are important sources of power and the latter in particular may yet prove transformational. But they are not a vehicle for Scottish or even British enrichment for the very simple and persuasive reason that renewable energy may be sourced from anywhere. Oil is valuable because it is rare; sun and wind are useful precisely because they are not. That helps explains why the claims made by Alex Salmond and Boris Johnson that Scotland and Britain could be "the Saudi Arabia of renewables" were just hot air. Renewable energy is a low return on capital sector and also, still, an expensive one.
Bracingly accurate stuff, understood by hardly anyone in Scottish politics. (And by absolutely nobody in the SNP or Scottish Greens).
We see here that Scotland is in the process of losing out once again when it comes to energy resources that, if anything, vastly outstrip anything the oil sector could have ever promised because, unlike oil, the sun and the wind will continue to deliver that energy long after the last barrel of oil is extracted from the ground.
Typically wrongheaded analysis from Common Weal. It is because renewable resources are unlimited, and everyone has them, that they are *less* valuable to Scotland’s economy than oil and gas were.
We see here that Scotland is in the process of losing out once again when it comes to energy resources that, if anything, vastly outstrip anything the oil sector could have ever promised because, unlike oil, the sun and the wind will continue to deliver that energy long after the last barrel of oil is extracted from the ground.
Typically wrongheaded analysis from Common Weal. It is because renewable resources are unlimited, and everyone has them, that they are *less* valuable to Scotland’s economy than oil and gas were.
“It would have been quite improper for me to make a whimsical or ill-informed reference to a document that I hadn’t seen before entering the chamber.”
This is just bizarre.
Neil Gray accidentally damns the Lord Advocate as a lawyer “of impugnable character”. (He presumably meant unimpugnable.)
The reasons for this were explained by Roseanna Cunningham (then the Cabinet Secretary with responsibility for ScotWind) in 2020:
Rather misleading answer from Gillian Martin in parliament yesterday. The conditionality in the ScotWind option agreements requires developers to make good on supply chain commitments irrespective of where the supply chain company is located. They do not preference local content.
Things getting rather fractious in the Scottish Parliament. Douglas Ross is asked to leave the chamber by the Presiding Officer. (He had complained about apparent bias in how she dealt with Points of Order from the SNP compared to those from Conservative MSPs.)
First image is excerpt from @scotnational.bsky.social interview with Gillian Martin.
“We can make those arguments on fairly solid ground”
Oh really? Just yesterday I received an FOI response after asking for details of the argument on transmission charging. Scot Gov had nothing.
The SNP’s arguments are not “on fairly solid ground”. They are utterly groundless.
