BEADS AND MIRRORS

A comment by regular Willie Hutchison. Willie has a Civil Engineering background was a chartered engineering surveyor involved predominately in the delivery of major infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, power generation and transmission.  

Quite quite astounding to look back at what Scotland has been at the forefront of over the years. Sadly that has all changed now as the country or at least the country’s people circle the ever widening drain.

At least when Scotland discovered oil Scotland got the benefit of building the rigs. But that sadly was small beer by comparison to the economic bonanza that the UK treasury reaped. Astoundingly Scotland has the honour of being a country that found oil and got poorer. Just look at where Norway or Dubai or Qatar were in the 70’s and look where they are now. By comparison poor old Jockistan doesn’t have a dual carriageway between Perth and Inverness whilst on the west coast the A82 north of Dumbarton has sections of road more reminiscent of rural India – and incidentally death rates to match the dilapidated and utterly under par infrastructure.

But these are only the more obvious signs of an impoverished country. Impoverished in so many areas like underfunded and under resourced health care. Impoverished in terms of energy poverty as hundred and hundreds of household struggle to heat and light their home. Impoverished in terms of a devastated indigenous manufacturing base. At least when we found oil we built the rigs but contrast that now with the new offshore and onshore renewable wind energy boom where the jackets legs are built in places like Dubai and China, the wind blades built in Norway, the generators in Germany, the offshore shipping by foreign marine companies and even the offshore labour where the UK government has granted dispensation to the corporate developers to utilize foreign cheaper labour. Just like they did with shipping to allow foreign labour Scots workers have been sacked to be replaced by workers from afar afield as Asia. 

It’s a grim picture and all the while huge wealth is being stripped out of Scotland. Kenny MacAskill MP has this week revealed that at today’s prices, the renewable wind energy produced in Scotland will by 2030 have a value of £2,120,000,000,000. Yes that’s £2.12 million million whilst all the while hundreds of thousands of homes freeze in cold and dark hovels. 

So where would Scotland be if it wasn’t being plundered by mother England. Good question and of course the corollary to that is where would England be if it didn’t have Scotland. Well the answer to that was given this week by the Bank of England’s chief economist when in a lecture Huw Pill warned that Britons need to accept that they are poorer. Citing the UK’s need to spend more on imports including gas, than recovered through the UK predominate service sector exports Mr Pill paints a bleak picture, a very bleak picture. And of course with the Pound Sterling’s post Brexit collapse from $1.50 to a nadir of near parity of $1.03 the current now stabilized at around $1.26 reveals just how bad a shape the UK is really in. No wonder they want to hold on to Scotland, destroy the Scottish Parliament to nothing more than a super council. 

And our people accept this. Like the indigenous Irish starved in the 1840s and 1850s famines where over a million died, whilst at least that number again emigrated, is the picture that different today?. Dying of cold, dying of lack of health care, struggling to buy food as inflation rips, are we that different from where the Irish were all those years ago?

And all in a country where at one time we led the world with invention innovation after innovation, we are truly now going the way of the indigenous American Indian or the Tasmanian aborigine. Colonialism, the destruction of a nation, the exploitation of a colony, and then we wonder why things are going the way they are. 

The Indians paid the price for the acceptance of glass beads, and today we accept the same pittance. But the thing is, we don’t have to. All it takes is will and a determination to prevail. England lost all their colonies, save for the present one of Scotland.

MY COMMENTS

Willie paints a pitiful story. Our country has been gaslighted. Those who should have spoke up and fought back didn’t, bought off with the trappings of an easy life. Blind to the problems of those not on the payroll they shamefully allowed our assets to be plundered by Westminster. They still do…everyday. We need revolution in Scotland, peaceful revolution but revolution none the less. Tinkering around the edges will not cut it. Upheaval it must be!

I am, as always

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