The Whisky Lobby convinced the Scottish Government to scrap environmental regulations

What kind of image do we want Scotland to sell to the world? Who do we want to sell it for us? What price are we willing to pay ourselves when they do?

News broke over the weekend from investigative journalists at The Ferret about how the multinational whisky sector successfully lobbied the Scottish Government to cancel plans to strengthen environmental regulations affecting the waste that distilleries produce. After 18 months of sustained lobbying from the sector, the files obtained by The Ferret suggest that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency “felt the need to roll over” and submit to industry demands.

This news comes just a few days after First Minister John Swinney joined the ranks of national leaders kissing the ring of Donald Trump in an attempt to negotiate carve outs for Scottish whisky within Trumps tariff-driven trade war.

There are many problems for our nation with stories like this. The first is, of course, the environment. In an era of climate emergency - alongside multiple other emergencies affecting the environment - it is simply unacceptable for industries to keep polluting the way they used to. Regulations must be tightened and tightened even further than the Government was initially willing to go here. Companies must find ways of meeting those regulations, must pay the full costs of the damage their products cause or must stop producing. This goes as much for whisky as it does for Scotland’s other keystone exports like oil (a primary cause of the climate emergency and a sector that is still resisting efforts to force it to include the pollution caused by burning the oil after they sell it against their internal carbon footprints) and salmon (where The Ferret has also done amazing work discovering the depths of animal welfare and environmental harms caused by that sector too).

The second is our reputation in the world. We spend a great deal of political time and effort (such as Swinney’s trip) promoting Scottish exports to the world but if those products are causing fundamental damage to the environment and to our own health then we owe a duty to to everyone to eliminate or at the very least reduce those harms.

And the third is the damage to our democracy. What we have in this whisky story is that a lobby of largely multinational companies (Scotland’s whisky sector is one of the most foreign-owned sectors within one of the most foreign-owned economies in the developed world) have successfully degraded the polices of an otherwise democratically elected government in a way that increases the amount of profit they can extract from Scotland while causing pollution that will measurably and avoidable degrade the environment of Scotland.

This is, of course, entirely with the permission of the Government. It would merely take the stroke of a pen and a vote in Parliament that the Government would surely win to reverse this decision.

That we know about this lobbying at all is due to both the Lobbying Register and laws around Freedom of Information. Neither of these frameworks go far enough to ensure that our Governments work transparently, but they do help - as shown by the diligent efforts of the journalists at The Ferret. Common Weal will continue to actively campaign for improvements to both and we urge you to write to your own MSPs to ask them to back the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill that is currently moving through Parliament and will do things like force the Government to proactively disclose documents like the ones uncovered here so people don’t need to FOI them, will remove the First Minister’s veto over disclosure even when instructed to do so by the Information Commissioner and would make it an offence for officials to destroy public information even if no FOI has been submitted for it (yet).

Democracy only works if we, the voters, can see who Government is talking to and who they are making decisions on the behalf of. Otherwise, it won’t just be whisky that the Government will be willing to roll over for.