Disclosure of the pleas made to Margaret Thatcher from within her own Cabinet against vetoing the North Sea gas pipeline project reminds us of the difference government can make to the fate of whole industries and regions.
The previous Labour government had seen this as a next logical step in harnessing North Sea assets. The private sector was queuing up to deliver massive investment in chemical projects at Nigg, Peterhead and elsewhere.
Until the Tory veto, the debate had been about end-user destinations for the gas rather than the principle.
Fife and Teesside were among the areas of high unemployment bidding for the onshore developments that would have flowed from a positive decision.
There is nothing doctrinaire about belief in the public sector underwriting projects like this one.
Sometimes, it is simply not realistic to expect private companies – even in oil and gas – to stump up for infrastructure which is more important to the longer-term national interest than to any short-term commercial ones.
But the dogma of the age was absolute. British Gas and the British National Oil Corporation would soon be privatised – and sinking £1.5billion of public funds into a gas pipeline soon became a candidate for the axe. The pleas made by ministers of the day like Lord Carrington and David Howell speak eloquently about the importance of the project to the whole UK economy.
These gentlemen would soon disappear from Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet but there was another political victim closer to home.
Hamish Gray, the MP for Ross and Cromarty, was minister of state at the Department of Energy but his electorate did not forgive him for what was seen as a great betrayal and he lost his seat to Charles Kennedy in 1983. Nigg had long been seen as a key location for onshore developments linked to the North Sea but there was never to be another major prize, and the potential for an industrial hub has remained largely unfulfilled.
To make matters worse, Dow (Chemicals) and other speculators continued to hold on to land in the hope of something on a similar scale turning up. It was only last year Dow finally agreed to sell their 800-acre holding.
When the 11 SNP MPs voted with Mrs Thatcher to bring down the Labour government in 1979, they ignored a lot of fates that Scotland would suffer as a result.
The value of these papers is to remind us that one of these was to destroy a project involving economic transformation for Nigg and Peterhead.
There is another lesson to be learned. Major decisions about public infastructure remain largely sub-contracted to the private sector and to regulators. It is a system which has so far conspicuously failed to deliver the “re-wiring of Britain” required to carry renewable energy from offshore to onshore, from islands to markets. That veto nowadays is more arms-length and subtle than in Mrs Thatcher’s hey-day but no less effective.
There was a lot to be said for the days when strategic decisions about the country’s economic needs were made by government in the national interest and funded accordingly. Nowhere is that more true than in the energy sector.