What’s the priority - economic wellbeing or geopolitics?
The calculus of what sacrifices a nation is willing to make to secure jobs and investment is an illogical mess which has very little to do with the economic interests or wellbeing of the people involved. Two offshore-related developments demonstrate the glaring contradictions – and the price to be paid.
Yesterday it was reported (again) that the Scottish Government is exploring the possibility of softening its stance on its previous opposition to new licenses for oil and gas exploration. There is now an unrelenting torrent of industry and media lobbying to ignore the science on climate change and instead to focus on the talking points of the oil and gas industry.
The other story is one where you'd imagine we'd be seeing it as a win-win – the establishment of a major manufacturing plant to support the offshore wind energy. It has everything – green jobs, inward investment, new technology, supply chain gain. Yet it is being eyed with suspicion. So what is going on?
Very simply, two things are being revealed; the mantra of 'growth and jobs at any cost' is utterly hollow and our geostrategic alliances are much more important than the wellbeing of the population. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn.
The reason is simple; the oil and gas exploration is being carried out by corporations headquartered in what are notionally allied nations and the investment in the factory is being proposed by China. That is it; that is the difference between the two cases.
The arguments in favour of the oil and gas are paper-thin. They simply operate on the basis that 'because others have backslid on climate change, we should just give up too'. But it is infuriating because they are ignorant and dishonest. If that was what people were saying, that would be one thing, but it isn't. They are using the most dishonest framing to suggest that more oil and gas actually helps a just transition.
You will have heard the line many times; 'we're going to need oil and gas for decades to come' – which is never followed by the honest, second part of that sentence which goes 'because we're doing everything we can to prevent it happening'. A comparator phrase might be 'we're going to need victim support services for decades to come – why not legalise crime?'.
The argument against the China development is pure paranoia. The fear is 'espionage', and in particular who can 'switch off' the Scottish/British economy. Almost everything now operates on the basis of software and so whoever controls that software controls the asset. This also applies to the wind turbines which are being built in Scotland.
The fear is that at some later date China could 'switch off' the turbines and there is nothing we could do. This is true, they could. It is a very good case for repatriating software control, a move which at the moment only Common Weal is actually talking about in Scotland. But that is not what we're talking about here. We're not nationalising the production of anything.
Rather, what we are saying is we only want one master and it is America and its close allies. We deem it an acceptable risk to allow Israel to be able to switch off our oil and gas and Donald Trump to be able to cripple the nation's entire communications network, switch off the internet and cause specialist medical equipment to cease working.
To be clear, on a simple analysis the China development is of much more long-term value to the people of Scotland than more oil fields (which we know have done very little for Scotland's real prosperity given we never owned any of it). The case against China is pure cold war paranoia, not rational policy.
Yet again, it is not that China is an endlessly reliable partner (though in recent times it is about the most reliable partner in geopolitics) nor that we should want our economy exposed to overseas control.
But we choose unreliable partners to own Scotland's economy on an almost constant basis (which they often sell out, move out, close down or betray in some other way) and we are enormously, dangerously exposed to overseas control. Common Weal would favour a consistent policy which put reliability and domestic security first – which would mean domestic ownership and control.
Instead the UK appears to be creating a role for itself as a devolved administration within Trump's America where industrial development in Scotland is only approved if it would make Trump happy and fit comfortably with the paranoid world view of the spooks.
It is not that these are necessarily easy questions to answer, it is that they are not being answered in the interests of the people of Scotland and the outcome of them isn't to meet our needs but those of a foreign policy elite in London. Will Scotland's interests ever be put first?