Wings Over Scotland

These are the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe-left grouping in the USA with around 60,000 members (or roughly 10 times as many as the Scottish Greens, though per capita closer to the SSP or RISE), at their conference a couple of days ago.

It’s our most fervent wish that one day the left will grasp the fact that this isn’t how you win a war.

It’s also our most abiding fear that this – with its stern admonitions against clapping, or banner-waving, or speaking to anyone who might disagree with you, or taking “fun shortcuts” or wearing “aggressive scents”, in case any of those things cause trauma to the sensitive – might as well be the SNP conference of 2022.

Let’s not blow independence in this Parliament, eh folks?

We haven’t done a good old-fashioned Quoted For Truth in quite some time, but on occasion someone else makes a point in a way that just can’t be improved on.

We’ve always known/said that this is THE core case for independence, of course, but sometimes seeing it from another country’s perspective brings the message home.

Last week, Norway rubbed our faces in it again.

In just THREE MONTHS, the investment return alone from its national oil fund was around £64 billion – more money than the total annual budget of Scotland, including both Scottish Government spending and money spent by the UK “on our behalf”.

(If you click that link, you can see the value of the fund increase and – less frequently – decrease live in hypnotic real time. We watched it for a few minutes, during which time it added over 220m Krone, or around £20 million.)

That’s like making more from three months’ interest on your bank account than your yearly wage. It’s what Scotland could – would – have had if we’d been independent since the 1970s, because we’ve produced slightly more oil from the North Sea in that time than Norway has. We just gave all ours away.

But we know that that chance has been blown now, and rather than enjoy bountiful interest windfalls we make crippling interest payments on the UK’s debt, to the tune of around £3.5bn a year, while being told we’re scrounging subsidy junkies who should be grateful for having been relieved of the troublesome burden of our wealth.

None of this is any sort of new information, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves regularly of what being in the UK has cost us over the decades – and what it could cost us again in terms of the remaining oil and the potentially even greater resource of renewable energy that our naturally-blessed country sits amid – if we don’t have the courage to take responsibility for ourselves.

And we’re sure these guys are at least partly to blame.

…is what they’re calling Jack and James now, we hear.

Draw your own conclusions about the word “crack” there.

…if only we could find the courage among ourselves.

Or so they say, at any rate. Near the end, we think.