Sam Taylor

Call for Audit Scotland ScotWind probe after claims country missed out on billions Audit Scotland is being urged to investigate claims Scotland lost billions in the ScotWind offshore leasing round after a report raised major…

Full story: www.heraldscotland.com/news/2557886...

Who says I only ever criticise the Scottish Government? The ScotWind auction really wasn’t a huge public finance scandal.

Debate on Scottish currency is thriving, claims John Swinney First minister says there is no secrecy over the plan despite his deputy Kate Forbes urging party members to stay quiet on the subject

Full story:

Kate Forbes’ remarks do indeed suggest exactly this.

Debate on Scottish currency is thriving, claims John Swinney First minister says there is no secrecy over the plan despite his deputy Kate Forbes urging party members to stay quiet on the subject

Full story:

Does anyone seriously believe this party is ready to fight another independence referendum?

John Swinney gives a very limp response to the Times story on Kate Forbes telling SNP members to keep quiet about currency. He was speaking this morning at the IPPR Scotland conference in Edinburgh.

LIVE John Swinney to give keynote speech at IPPR Scotland conference YouTube video by Daily Record

Full speech plus Q&A here, via @dailyrecord.co.uk www.youtube.com/live/myQddZe...

Video here:

John Swinney gives a very limp response to the Times story on Kate Forbes telling SNP members to keep quiet about currency. He was speaking this morning at the IPPR Scotland conference in Edinburgh.

John Swinney was asked about this story at an IPPR conference in Edinburgh this morning. He said there was no problem talking about currency, because all the answers are in his latest independence paper. This will surprise the handful of people who have actually read that paper.

6/ The SNP has no credible answer to the currency question, so no wonder Kate Forbes is pleading with members to stop talking about it...

The clips are here:

Kate Forbes discovers the Streisand effect.

1/ 🚨 Kate Forbes says SNP members “must avoid talking publicly about currency”. (According to SNP branch meeting minutes leaked at Tim Rideout’s Scottish Currency Group conference.)

6/ The SNP has no credible answer to the currency question, so no wonder Kate Forbes is pleading with members to stop talking about it...

Don’t talk about a Scots currency, Forbes tells SNP members The deputy first minister advised colleagues to avoid discussion about plans for an independent currency after criticism by economists

5/ The Times has the story here:

4/ What a farce. The SNP’s currency position is shambolic - more confused today than at any point in the last decade. (The speaker in the above videos is Ian Stewart of the Scottish Currency Group.)

3/ 🚨 Kate Forbes’ replacement as candidate for Skye & Lochalsh wants to keep the pound, and probably one day join the euro.

2/ 🚨 John Swinney wants to join the euro. (According to one of his “minions”. Does Swinney realise that joining the euro could only happen after an independent Scotland had first established its own currency? Probably not.)

1/ 🚨 Kate Forbes says SNP members “must avoid talking publicly about currency”. (According to SNP branch meeting minutes leaked at Tim Rideout’s Scottish Currency Group conference.)

Yet this abject nonsense is the SNP's policy. I discussed this over the weekend with Sam Taylor from the think-tank These Islands. He has made himself the personal scourge of the Scottish Government's fanciful energy policies. He points out the government's renewables analysis is based on the assumption that while Scotland's wind energy demand will rise to 6,000 megawatts over the next decade, its wind capacity will increase to 49,400 megawatts. Yet to assemble that capacity would mean installing turbines on an unprecedented scale, at unprecedented cost, and benefiting from the UK-wide energy market - from which the Scottish Government otherwise wishes to secede. Taylor notes that SNP ministers' favourite example, Norway, while a non-nuclear renewables success story, has struggled to generate sufficient energy in the recent past and has often had to rely on neighbouring Sweden, with its nuclear power stations.

1/ In today’s Mail, @stephendaisley.bsky.social mentions a conversation we had about the SNP’s energy policies. Short 🧵 with sources and a little bit of additional explanation…

Philippa Whitford channels Emma Harper. Currency problem solved because we now have Apple Pay.

10/ Full column is here: newspaperscotland.mailplus.co.uk/data/6840/re...

9/ Scot Gov was implicitly saying that despite its anti-nuclear stance, Scotland would still depend, from time to time, on nuclear power stations in the rest of GB. The complete opposite of the SNP’s public rhetoric.

8/ This is a very interesting excerpt. Scot Gov basically said: “Norway just about gets away with what we’d be attempting, but only because neighbouring Sweden has nuclear power stations.”

Electricity demand in the event of the power stations at Torness and Peterhead being decommissioned: EIR release Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.

7/ The other source is an FOI response. In 2022 I asked for Scot Gov analysis on how Scotland would meet electricity demand in the event of the power stations at Torness (nuclear) and Peterhead (gas) being decommissioned. The response is here:

6/ Essentially Scotland can get away with things as part of the fully integrated GB market which it could never achieve as an independent nation. The full report is here:

5/ … by consuming the excess output at guaranteed (and high) prices when the wind really blows. GB as a whole cannot do that. Building more than 8x peak GB demand in wind generation would require neighbouring nations to underwrite the costs. That is plainly not going to happen.