SNP ministers have quietly downgraded their claim that Scotland has a quarter of Europe’s offshore wind potential to just 7%, in a major blow to their economic case for independence. The Telegraph has the story.
Neil Gray, the Scottish Energy Secretary, wrote to a Holyrood committee with the revised estimate after SNP ministers were forced to admit that the 25% figure they had used for years was false.
Emails disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act showed Mr. Gray wanted to bury the update, with his officials writing that he was “not sure we need to draw attention to the issue with a letter to committee”.
His civil servants told him that was not possible as the Scottish Government had committed to informing Parliament when a new figure had been calculated.
But they agreed to hush up the 7% estimate, saying: “No proactive communications are recommended.” This meant that no press release was issued or announcement made when he wrote to Holyrood’s Net Zero and energy committee in September.
The SNP had used the 25% figure since 2010 and it was a keystone of the party’s economic case for independence. It was included in the Scottish Government’s white paper on separation, published before the 2014 referendum.
But a freedom of information request by think tank These Islands disclosed that servants had concerns about its accuracy more than three years ago, with officials stating in Oct 2020 that it had “proved very difficult to source”.
Internal Scottish Government correspondence showed an official warned that it had “never, to my knowledge, been properly sourced”.
In January 2021, another civil servant warned that “we did recycle those figures quite robotically without really checking them”.
These Islands discovered that the 25% figure was calculated by combining statistics from two old reports, one of which used a definition of Europe that included only 11 countries and was based on information from 1993.
But Angus Robertson, the SNP’s Constitution Secretary, was among the SNP ministers who persisted in using the figure and it was included in the Scottish Government’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which was published in March last year.
Ian Blackford, the SNP’s then Westminster leader, and other nationalist MPs repeated the claim again during a Commons debate on Scottish independence a year ago. The SNP’s Scottish Green coalition colleagues also tweeted it.
Wasn’t it determined with Boris that misleading Parliament, however unwittingly, is a sackable offence?
Worth reading in full.
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“not sure we need to draw attention to the issue” ————ha ha ha jeez. —-Eco Socialists only draw attention to issues if they support their ludicrous green pretend to save the planet agenda. Remember this is the same absurd SNP that wanted to pour concrete in gas wells. There are 21 million gas boilers in the UK and these imbeciles want to scorch earth all our gas. ——But if you can reduce your estimate of the amount of Europe’s wind down from 25% to 7% it can easily be dropped to 2%. It is the same with every claim made by climate alarmists. Everything they say is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency, which gets debunked then swept under carpets and they then move onto the next excuse for their eco communism. It will either be too much rain, not enough rain, too many storms and worse storms, droughts, floods, wild fires and pigs farting too much. ——Every bit of it upon further scrutiny though is exposed as JUNK. There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, and the need for thousands of bird and bat chopping turbines is simply an exercise in denying us the energy we really need in industrialised society. The most important commodity is ENERGY and UN inspired western politicians are determined we are not to have it, with the imbeciles of the SNP/ Green pincer movement some of the most fanatical.
Isn’t this something that the BBC’s “Verify” service should have spotted? I sense that, like the Scottish Civil Servants, they only choose to verify what their political masters deem to be appropriate.
Well they didn’t verify wotsername’s CV, did they?
…verify “service”…
FTFY
Spot on Varmint!
“Potential”
Some days the wind doesn’t blow much/at all even in windy Britain
Do they still teach geography in schools in Scotland?
Nope. Too much of a white privilege subject.
Nope, they only teach history: William Wallace, aka Mel Gibson and a dash of Robert de Bruce watching the spider…
The Toytown political party again does what it is best at – shooting itself in the feet.
The SNP control 7% or Europe’s wind? Where’s James Bond when you need him?
Er. I think that’s what the article said?
Greens not green its ecocide
leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Jeez … we’ll never get rid of the parasites north of the border.
They lied. That tells you everything you need to know about net zero, in the whole of the UK. They LIED! They keep lying and will continue to do so. It is not scientifically possible, so they lie. It is time we followed the money rather more carefully.