WAKE UP TO HOW THE WORLD WORKS
ALTHOUGH The Ferret and The Herald are to be congratulated for revealing the facts they have been doing (“Who runs Scotland, July 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16), I find it extremely worrying that any of it comes as news to anyone who is allowed to vote. The fact that the Global Establishment owns Scotland’s major assets should not come as a surprise to anyone who ever leaves the house, as all our supermarkets, all our major fast-food retailers almost every brand you can think of has no Scottish connection other than that they take our money and offer a few Scots low wages in return. We are simply a resource.
Even our governance, our vaunted UK democracy, is not ours to control. Oh yes, we regularly get to vote for the donkey with the blue hat or the red hat but we don’t get to choose who the donkeys actually are, that is all done by the central party executive and they themselves are controlled from above, by money. A donkey can sit for decades in Holyrood and decide your future without ever being elected a constituency MSP. No party would choose donkeys who won’t do what they are told. The fact our Prime Minister has been sacked from previous jobs, clearly struggles to understand basic household bills or doesn’t question holiday costs and lacks the unanimous support of his fellow MPs, graphically demonstrates how that rotten system works.
That Scottish wind farms are owned by the Global Establishment and they pay little or no tax here is because the same cohort that owns them decides the rules of the game. That is why our wages are taxed at source yet the rich who own the assets pay heehaw tax.
The situation can be summed up nicely by the fact that a Danish billionaire with little connection to Scotland can appear out of the blue and in a few short years become the second-biggest, if not the biggest, landowner in Scotland (“Scotland’s largest private landowners under fire over lobbying influence as store tycoon’s objection to spaceport is revealed”, The Herald, July 16). He can contemplate rewilding areas and introducing wolves while at the same time many Scots face increasing levels of poverty and the backside is hanging out the NHS’s pants.
That’s how the world works, it is ruled by the rich and if they could care less about us they would. Wake up, Scotland.
David J Crawford, Glasgow.
ENTREPRENEURIAL Scotland is well represented in the new Council of Economic Advisors to the Scottish Government. I expect it will shortly get down to considering the country’s huge potential to create clean energy far beyond our domestic requirements. No doubt it will also look at the prospect of exporting clear, clean water as Europe and the south of England warm up due to climate change.
Already several very big businesses are gathering to bid for offshore wind licences from the Scottish Government (“Giants increase competition for windfarm licences off Scotland”, The Herald, July 16).
This evokes a strong sense of déjà vu, as I recall Westminster doling out the oil exploration and development licences in the early 1970s. Big Oil rewarded Scotland with several decades of hard-working jobs extracting this national resource from our waters and Aberdeen enjoyed boom times – now a distant memory.
We should however remember that whereas the UK has nothing to show for these boom years, Norway dealt with its natural asset differently and today enjoys the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world and is its six wealthiest nation.
Climate change is probably a lot more certain than exploring for oil, and clearly Big Business now thinks so. It now behoves the Scottish Government to ensure that this potential wealth benefits the whole nation and the profits do not disappear without trace into the insatiable neoliberal global machine.
FR Morrison, Helensburgh.
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