Viceroy Murray's Brand Scotland junkets are about selling more of Scotland's wealth
Published in the Edinburgh Evening News, December 2nd, 2024.
Viceroy Murray is currently on a junket to Malaysia and Singapore to promote “Brand Scotland,” a PR campaign with a £750,000 budget so the Viceroy can flit around the world in style.
Earlier this month he was in Norway purportedly to promote Scotland’s energy sector. It turns out he asked the Norwegian state-owned Equinor to buy up more of Scotland’s renewable energy assets. It already owns and operates Hywind Scotland, the world’s first floating wind farm.
Norwegian green energy giant Statkraft, also state-owned and Europe’s largest renewable energy producer, recently bought a 450MW 'water battery' project next to Loch Ness to store renewable energy and it operates several onshore wind farms in Scotland. I wonder if the Viceroy wondered why Norway, with a population and resource base similar to Scotland’s, is so prosperous. (Hint: it has something to do with the fact that it is no longer controlled by Sweden but governs itself.)
I’ve previously written about SSE Renewables and SSE plc, neither of which is Scottish-owned. SSE plc is English and half-owned by institutional investors like BlackRock. It operates some of the largest renewables projects in Scotland - the Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm (588MW) and Stronelairg Onshore Wind Farm (228MW).
Two other foreign governments, France and Sweden, control large parts of Scotland’s renewables sector. France’s state-owned EDF operates several projects including the Neart na Goitre offshore wind farm,
and the Dorenell wind farm.
Swedish state-owned energy company, Vattenfall, controls the Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm
and the Clashindarroch II Wind Farm to be constructed near Huntly, Aberdeenshire. A Scottish conservation group tried to stop the latter project on the grounds it would harm the endangered Scottish wildcat population, but last week the Court of Session threw out its appeal.
Few people realise that Scottish Power is a fully owned subsidiary of Spanish energy company, Iberdrola, whose shareholders include BlackRock and the Qatar Investment Authority. “Scottish Power” operates large renewables projects like Whitelee Wind farm.
All of these projects on Scottish territory are controlled by these foreign governments and corporations with the profits flowing to them, not to Scotland.
If the Viceroy gave a toss about Scotland, he’d fight for Scotland to control and profit from its own resources. Instead, he tries to hoodwink us with English Labour’s GB Energy con that’s received just £125 million and whose CEO resides in Manchester.
And instead of jetting off to the Far East to scrounge for lousy trade deals, he’d be fighting for Scotland to regain access to the huge EU market on its doorstep.
But we know the Viceroy’s loyalties lie with his London masters and, in due course, he’s hoping to don some ermine and retire with his big fat pension pot.
I'm going to have to stop reading your posts Leah for the sake of my sanity. How much ridicule and gaslighting will the Scots take before doing something about it? How about a picket outside Holyrood every morning, jeering the devolutionists as they go in to debate such vital matters as what a woman is rather than the raison d'etre which they were elected on. No, even that would be too much to ask.
I despair.
Yes Leah, the plunder of Scotland's renewable energy over the next 50 years may well exceed the £trillions plundered from Scotland's oil and gas fields over the last 50 years. Renewable energy produced here will soon have a retail value of £100+ billion a year, all plundered from our nation and people who receive no royalties for this resource.
Meantime, our energy rich nation is forced to pay what is probably the highest energy prices in the world! Plunder and exploitation of this nature are all part of the colonial balance sheet, a country rendered un-competitive and under-developed, lacking in economic growth or opportunity so long as we are unable to access our own resources.
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/04/18/the-realities-of-an-energy-rich-scotland-plundered-under-colonial-rule/