County’s future looking bright
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A STRONG focus of Caithness and north Sutherland regeneration is well summed up as "The right time, the right place and the right people". That was the theme I explored last week with Energy, Enterprise and Tourism Minister Fergus Ewing, local businesses and public bodies.
Fergus’s team sees Caithness as a hub in the north Highlands with a bright future. Midweek I hosted an impressive gathering of private business and public representatives at a reception in Holyrood.
Highly efficient engineering firms such as JGC and Subsea 7, and harbours under major development at Scrabster and Wick, along with the key connection of Wick John O’Groats Airport, are a clue to the skills deployed from Dounreay. Decommissioning ends around 2023 with the jobs rundown starting in three years’ time, so we must review the prospects with sobriety, not pessimism.
As we speak, four Holyrood committees are scrutinising National Planning Framework 3, which focuses on low-carbon places and key national projects. Caithness and north Sutherland form one hub for on and offshore renewables, plus oil and gas developments west of Shetland.
A shift of effort from the North Sea to the north-east Atlantic favours our northernmost mainland ports Scrabster and Wick, plus Gills to a lesser extent. The proximity of tidal power in the Pentland Firth and nearest landfall for offshore wind in the Moray Firth is a mouthwatering prospect. I saw an Orkney-based tidal device on the new quay at Scrabster as a harbinger of much collaboration across the Pentland Firth in marine renewables to come.
We face the optimism versus pessimism test head on. Jobs for well-educated local people, many more affordable homes for them and government policies to give a stable platform for energy development all point to the big choices to make this September.
Our firms already trade with customers who use different currencies and firms down south won’t turn their backs on their biggest customers here. We do need the confidence to grasp the opportunities the Scottish Government sees in an all-Scotland sustainable success story.
A BBC poll on people’s priorities in this independence referendum year ranks the economy first, pensions second and welfare third. These questions will get full answers from the YES campaign in a series of meetings and surgeries in these parts in coming weeks.
"Scotland’s Future", the Scottish Government’s white paper for independence, lays out the most detailed prospectus ever of a nation on the brink of decision time over the opportunities of normal independent status.
Discussion of these three topics can be found starting on page 54 – Strong foundations – financial and economic strengths; page 138 – Pensions – the opportunities available to Scotland; and page 150 – Scotland’s social protection system. The discussion about Scotland’s energy market plus oil and gas starts on page 293. Just Google scotsreferendum.com if you haven’t already ordered your paper copy.
A focus on energy prospects was a key environmental argument addressed in Evidence, Risk and the Wicked Issues in Arguing for Independence written just before his untimely death by Stephen Maxwell in 2012 and published by Luath Press.
On page 159 he noted the urgent need for clean energy development as China and India and other countries industrialise and climate change becomes all the more obvious.
It is timely to look at our neighbours. Stephen quoted economist Donald Mackay, who noted in 2011 that "the position with renewables today is not dissimilar to the position of the embryonic North Sea oil and gas industries in the UK and Norway in the late 1960s – a natural resource base of uncertain size requiring massive technological advances to drive down its costs and massive investment to deliver the outputs to its markets".
Stephen concluded that with North Sea oil revenues as one source of back-up funding, the medium and long-term odds are too attractive to ignore. In the last few weeks a focus on how our Scandinavian neighbours have coped with such prospects has been explored by Michael Booth, an English journalist for The Guardian, who lives in Denmark and has published "the grim truth behind the Scandinavian miracle".
Looking at Norway, the most comparable of the Nordics to Scotland, Booth quotes a book Petromania by journalist Simon Strew, who warns that the powerful oil lobby is "isolating us and making the country asocial". According to him, his countrymen have been corrupted by their oil money, are working less, retiring earlier, and calling in sick more frequently. And while previous governments have controlled the spending of oil revenues, the new bunch is threatening a splurge which many warn could lead to full-blown Dutch disease.
Booth concludes Norway, while amassing the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, goes on selling fossil fuels to the rest of us. Stephen mentions this dilemma for Scotland’s future in the face of our world-leading Climate Change Act.
Not surprisingly, Nordic commentators replied to Mr Booth. In the case of Norway, Agnes Bolsø, associate professor of sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, suggests his account "doesn’t capture the overall sociocultural and political climate in this country. There have been reversals with the newly elected right-wing government."
These include reducing the father’s share of parental leave and steps to undermine abortion law, as well as tax cuts for the rich – measures making life tougher for small-scale farmers, and an expansion of private schools.
In the global economy, it is almost impossible to maintain fully social democratic policies, but this government is launching deliberate attacks on collective and sustainable solutions. However, many Norwegians are fighting back and provoking lively debate.
Parallels in many policies of all the London-based parties are obvious. Bolsø questions whether such policies "could genuinely influence whether the country rem ains a good place to live". Life in the north Highlands and all of Scotland is at the constitutional crossroads where we can choose.
rob.gibson.msp@scottish.parliament.uk
