I don’t often tune in to the deliberations of the Scottish Parliament – an omission which does not, I confess, engender any great sense of deprivation.
However, scanning the car radio dial a couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon exchanges from Holyrood under the heading North Sea Oil and Gas Production which mainly consisted of Fergus Ewing, the Holyrood energy minister, doing most of the talking.
It was a pretty depressing 20 minutes during which the extent to which the great North Sea industry has become condemned to being treated as a suitable subject for shallow, political point-scoring, grew all too apparent.
I suppose this is what we are lumbered with for the duration of the referendum campaign. Yet common sense suggests that it doesn’t have to be like this for nobody has a monopoly on predicting the future – and pretending otherwise is plain foolish.
For 40 years, there has been a general political consensus around the North Sea. For obvious reasons, this has been based on the premise that it is in the UK collective national interest to create an environment which promotes development and maximises revenues for the Exchequer.
The only ideological parting of the ways came with the Thatcher government’s decision to abolish the British National Oil Corporation and turn the North Sea into an industry run entirely by the private sector, with the state as regulator.
That happened 30 years ago and, as far as I know, nobody is planning to reverse it now or in the future, irrespective of the constitutional arrangements. So that is the context we are operating within, which all political parties accept and on which future prognostications must be based.
That apart, the role of government has been fairly consistent irrespective of who was in power. There have been occasional upsets over taxation hikes but the noise has probably been greater than the genuine fury – and, where proven wrong, government has stepped back.
It is in Westminster’s interest, more than anyone’s, not to frighten away investment through punitive taxation. So a balance has had to be struck which is currently proving extremely successful in attracting new investment aimed at prolonging the life of the North Sea and opening up West of Shetland.
The key event in disrupting common sense was publication of a leaked document by John Swinney, the Holyrood finance minister, in which he warned that revenues from oil were unpredictable, that an independent Scotland would be disproportionately reliant on them and that if they fell, it might be difficult to pay pensions and unemployment benefit.
These were perfectly sensible warnings which, unsurprisingly, were seized on by opponents of Scottish independence. This in turn led to a frenzied exercise in damage limitation led by Alex Salmond in which new predictions were rapidly conjured up, not only for the longevity of the North Sea but also for the future price of oil.
That roughly is the background to the exchanges I heard on radio in which Ewing declared that the North Sea still contains “24,000million barrels of oil with a potential wholesale value of up to £1.5trillion”. He then explained helpfully to cheers and desk-thumping: “That is £1.5million, million”!
Whether expressed in millions, billions or trillions, this was possibly the most pointless statistic ever quoted at Holyrood once the caveats were taken account of – “wholesale”, “potential”, “up to” . . .
But it was only the start of more such rhetoric, all designed to replace the Swinney warnings with unalloyed certainties about what the future holds.
Anyone who challenged the Bibilical authority of these wild assertions was accused of “talking Scotland down” or, as a variation, “talking the industry down”.
People who have spent their lives in the industry – unlike Ewing who is a Glasgow solicitor – were cast as apostates, denying what (to him) had suddenly become unassailable truths.
Then Rhoda Grant, for Labour, had a go. She said that “Professor Alex Kemp tells us that by 2050 we will be producing less than 9% of current levels”.
Knowing Alex Kemp, that didn’t sound right either. He is far too experienced to express any such certainty given the vast number of imponderables which will exist between now and 2050.
So after reading the transcript of these exchanges, just to confirm that my ears hadn’t failed me, I took refuge in the immense common sense of a web-cast available on BBC Scotland in which Professor Kemp dealt at length, displaying his usual courtesy, fairness and attention to detail with the same subject matter that was so crudely abused in these 20 minutes at Holyrood.
He gave his best estimates, explained the challenges, outlined the imponderables. None of this, it must be said, gave a shred of comfort to Ewing’s bombastic claims.
But the real answer is that nobody knows – all that any responsible politician can do is try to create an environment which gives the best possible chance to those who actually do the work.
Politically-expedient claims, based on an almost total absence of first-hand knowledge, about what is going to happen in 10, 20 or 50 years time is not going to make one drop of difference to the actual investment or extraction rates of North Sea oil and gas in the meantime.
Why can’t they just admit that and concentrate on doing a few useful things to support the industry, rather than using it as a crude political football?
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