Neoliberal Kate Forbes vows to sell more of Scotland's assets to foreigners

Published in The National, May 14th, 2024, The Edinburgh Evening News, May 15th, 2024.

Neoliberal Kate Forbes is promising to sell off more of Scotland to foreigners. This is the woman who as Finance minister pushed two ‘green’ freeports onto Scotland, vast regulation-free playgrounds for private companies to skim off even more money from Scotland’s hard-pressed communities.

Forbes sounds just like English Labour’s Rachel Reeves when she claims she wants “to get the economy firing on all cylinders.” This is meaningless verbiage. The ‘growth’ she’s talking about won’t benefit the Scottish People because Scotland doesn’t own and control its land and resources and without a central bank doesn’t have the power to create needed investment in public services and infrastructure, the real engines of economic growth.

Between 1998 and 2021 Scotland lost £277 billion to foreign companies who repatriated their profits and shareholder dividends to England and overseas. These people don’t need encouragement to buy more of Scotland. It’s proven so lucrative that they’re baying for more and Swinney’s administration will satisfy their insatiable appetite by continuing the mass sell-off of Scotland’s assets. Grangemouth is one recent example - the Scottish administration hasn’t lifted a finger to save the refinery from closure.

The cabling of £600 billion of renewable energy to England in 2021 for zero compensation is another. This figure was provided to Alba MP Kenny MacAskill when in January 2023 he asked Graham Stuart, Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, how much renewable energy was Scotland sending to England (The estimated price for 35 terawatts by 2022 prices is £600 billion. In 2030, the estimated price of electricity for 124 Twh will be between £5 and 9 trillion):

And when in January 2022 the Scottish administration grossly undersold ScotWind offshore leases for a one-off price of £700m when they were worth £16b and £60b in revenues, it committed an act of criminality against the Scottish People.

Scotland’s wealth loss is, according to Common Weal, bigger than any developed country and is the real reason for Scotland’s depressed economy. Had our assets remained in public hands, the wealth they generated would have stayed here, providing jobs and much needed revenue for investment.

The Scottish administration, a Westminster tool, won’t stop the plunder. That’s up to the sovereign Scottish People, who must unite to call time on this fake union.