The curse of volatility
Posted on
July 31, 2013 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The world's most-read Scottish politics website
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A tall tale
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Ad it’s still less than the collective bonuses being paid out to a handful of bankers in London.
Well, probably.
I’m very sceptical of the unionists’ when they only mention “oil revenues” in any calculations coming from our section of the North Sea .
Are they deliberately leaving out Scotland’s gas revenues when calculating Scotland’s North sea revenues that make up 60% of the UK total gas production.
Don’t fall into their trap folks.
Didn’t Gordon Brown sell 60% of the UK’s gold reserves to reduce risk and because it earned no return? Well we missed out on a possible +560% return and lost £9 billion.
Is this what is meant by reducing risk – giving away your assets?
Why would anyone listen to anything the Westminster parties have to say about oil, after they all colluded to suppress the McCrone Report.
Do the unionists have such a low opinion of the Scots or is it they that are stupid?
You get to decide in 2014.
This was the link I meant to post .
This was the link I meant to post, but apparently you can’t post links when editing.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Murray – yep, he did sell the gold. I remember seeing the advert on e-bay one evening as i was perusing for a new lawnmower spark plug.
I think in the end the winning bid was about £10.45, but the postage costs were around £50,000.
Broon’s e-bay moniker is ‘radioactivefifeno1’
Do the unionists have such a low opinion of the Scots or is it they that are stupid?
Both
In the last 6+ years the highs and lows of the tax take on UK petrol sales alone is £6 billion (*1). That’s almost the same as the cost of the Iraq war.
Petrol is a bonus to the UK economy and its also a necessity. It’s just that its bonus is big enough to fund illegal wars.
*1: 20 billion litres petrol sold; 89p to 139p price range; 60% duty and VAT take.
@ Luigi
To be fair, it was kind of a loaded question. Correct answer though. 😉
It must be such a burden for Scotland still to have over a Trillion quids worth of oil in the North Sea, if only we didnt have it independence would be so much easier.
North Sea oil for the UK..a brilliant asset, North Sea oil for Scotland..a terrible hindrance.
Who in their right mind would believe this preposterous equation, if only Einstein were alive today, he’d have the answer.
This and all the other LIES now circulating my area, Aberdeenshire, in a BT leaflet delivered with the junk mail by the Postie. Obviously BT cant muster anybody to do door drops
Ah Better Together, where to disagree is to become the disappeared. They lie and they cannot stand the disinfectant of sunlight.
Murray McCallum says:
31 July, 2013 at 8:49 pm
In the last 6+ years the highs and lows of the tax take on UK petrol sales alone is £6 billion (*1). That’s almost the same as the cost of the Iraq war.
I read somewhere that the tax take on petrol for 1 year’s sales in the UK is £35 bln.
To put it into prospective, the UK exchequer takes around £10 bln per annum in tax on tobacco sales.
Trend analysis. Compare Oil and the FTSE which isn’t a commodity. That is all.
Maybe I’m over-simplifying things, but don’t all tax-takes vary from year to year?
Yet we are the envy of the middle East:
link to newsnetscotland.com
Nice graphic from Project Fear.
NHS Scotland has a healthy trace on show.
Unlike the flatlining UK economy under Osbourne’s tenure.
alexicon
Yes indeed the £35 billion sounds like fuel (petrol, diesel, ..) duty & VAT on all fuels. I just looked at the price variation in petrol. It is obviously a valuable resource for the UK economy.
The thing is the BT stuff is all bollocks. The price of things go up and down (and therefore the tax). It’s what you look to spend the money on that counts. You would hope the voters actually get economic plans they voted for. These voting norms do not currently apply in Scotland.
Murray McCallum I watched the Keizer Report last night. Keizer and his guest said that Gordon Brown sold the gold to save a named giant American bank that had got in to deep trouble trading gold in the London markets.No idea as to the validity of their opinion.
reginald
I watched that too. I am a big fan of Max and Stacey. This angle on the UK gold reserves sale by Gordon Brown is mentioned in an old article in the Telegraph
link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk
I used the “official” explanation for the sale. Either way it was one hell of an expensive mistake! Puts the alleged UK savings from the Bedroom Tax in perspective.
@HoracesaysYes.
If you look at UK tax returns just in the years since devolution they vary between £336bn in 1999-2000 and £522bn in 2010-11 [Source: GERS].
This is a difference of £186bn which is greater than the entire UK NHS budget 2011-12 (£117bn) *and* the entire budget for Scotland! (£64.5bn).
Yes…I know that these figures don’t take into account of inflation or growth in the economy…but then…neither do the figures in that poster.
Looking at what is supposed to be an ECG rhythm I would be very worried about the patient. Hopefully it represents the life of this union and it is on its death bed to be finally put out of its misery next year.
The net food and drink (groceries if you like) bill for England is many times the oil revenue in size. A bill that has to be paid before money is spent on anything else.
Scotland, however, is a net food and drink exporter.
Yet somehow, that fact receives very little airing.
Does anyone think that the apparatchiks who collate this pish for project fear will start to see through the tissue of lies and themselves start to drift away from such a negative destructive and self defeating campaign?
maybe we can turn some of them and use them as moles
bags me that little shite with the rosy cheeks who phones people for a “wee blether together” 🙂
Surely everybody must realise that oil prices would be just as volatile after a No vote. The difference is that instead of handing all of that variable revenue south and getting a portion of it back, a Yes vote would see all of it going to us.
The Unionists argue that oil makes up too big a percentage of our GDP.
Following this logic that would mean if we had twice as much oil, it would make up twice as much of our GDP and be twice as big a problem.
If we had half as much oil it would only be half the problem.
So what they are arguing is that we have too much oil and the more oil we have, the worse it is for us.
The solution apparently is to share out all the money between everyone in the UK so that we only get 10% of it and effectively give 90% of the money away. That supposedly ‘protects’ us from fluctuations in the price of oil.
How do they even come up with this nonsense?
Manny – well, they’ve got a point I suppose. If I give all my money away so that I’m completely penniless, fluctuations in the price of food, fuel and so on don’t affect me. After all, when was the last time you heard a beggar on the street complaining about energy prices?
I suspect when Labour say we benefit from the union, they’re referring to the increase in people who are too poor to be taxed, and thus don’t have to worry themselves about fluctuations in tax rates. Aye, that must be it.
Whilst it’s a lot of fun to debunk the Project Fear/Better Together numbers in order to help the referendum victory – please remember that in the event of a YES vote, I’d quite like to replay the Better Together numbers back to the rUK when we are doing the negotiations on when parting the assets/liabilities.
think about it. “But you said there was only £2bn tax revenue left in the north sea – so that’s what we’ll draw up the terms of the independence agreement on”
Scotland would save £ Billions.
@sideshowmanny
Yep, the fact is we wee folk really can’t handle biggish numbers and should really spread the risk of oil ‘ups and doons’. It makes sense to some kinda looney I suppose!
callum says:
liking your thinking callum!
like the film the Money Pit where the guy selling the house says, “taking the staircase with me, oh taking the kitchen with me, and taking the windows with me” and laughs each time but when the new owner Richard Prior takes over the house the staircase kitchen and windows are gone,
leave them with the mouse droppings in the drawers 🙂
let em go frack emselves!
And we’ll have that 6000 miles of sea back thanks,
meanwhile
close the gas plant in immingham and start bringing the gas ashore at peterhead
“in the event of a YES vote, I’d quite like to replay the Better Together numbers back to the rUK when we are doing the negotiations on when parting the assets/liabilities.”
Good plan!