Scotland's high energy bills are the cost of the Union

The National

10-07-2025

THE Westminster Government, which is in control of energy policy, has announced it is scrapping plans for zonal energy pricing.
The energy secretary Ed Miliband had been considering the plan, which would divide the UK into different energy zones in which electricity pricing would vary according to supply and demand within the zone. If implemented, this could have seen energy-rich areas of the UK, such as Scotland, enjoying much lower electricity prices. Meanwhile, customers in areas of high consumption but low production, would pay more than customers in energy-rich Scotland.
The plan would not just benefit Scottish domestic energy consumers, it would also create a boost to the Scottish economy by incentivising industries which are heavy users of electricity to relocate to Scotland, creating jobs and opportunities in Scotland.
Energy company Octopus Energy has claimed that the introduction of a zonal energy market in the UK would give Scots some of the cheapest electricity in Europe.
Currently, in places like Scotland where supply far outstrips demand, energy production is often switched off at times. Scotland's biggest wind farm – Seagreen – is paid to not generate 71% of the time it could be in operation. As a result, the effective cost of electricity it generates is four times higher than it should be.
When an offshore wind farm in Scotland produces more electricity than the network can handle it is paid to turn off, or be "constrained", and a gas-fired power plant in the south of England is paid to turn on.
According to Octopus Energy, constraint costs have hit almost £700 million already this year. This money goes to the energy companies, who are being paid to do nothing, giving them an enormous vested interest in retaining the current system. The costs are ultimately transferred to the consumer in the form of higher bills.
A zonal energy market would reduce the need to switch off generation by encouraging industries with high energy demand to move their operations to Scotland. These could include chemical, aluminium, and steel manufacturing, and data processing, amongst others. A zonal energy market could potentially create a jobs boom for Scotland and deliver a massive stimulus to the Scottish economy.
Naturally, the same would be the case with independence, which would also allow Scotland to reap the financial benefit of exporting its massive surplus of electricity to England at full market price.
Zonal pricing could have cut the cost of renewing and updating the country's electricity grid by billions.
A report by FTI Consulting predicted overall savings of £52 billion for consumers over 20 years, while another, which was commissioned by Octopus, found the UK would need to spend £27bn less on major grid upgrades in the future.
However on Thursday Miliband confirmed that the plan would be abandoned in favour of a single UK-wide pricing structure which Miliband claimed would help ensure that the energy system was 'fair, affordable, secure and efficient'.
But really, what this means is that the Labour Party has decided that it is politically more acceptable to keep charging Scots some of the highest electricity prices in Europe so that energy-rich Scotland can continue to subsidise the energy bills of consumers in London and south east England.
Your high energy bill is quite literally the cost of the Union. That's a direct subsidy from Scotland to England that anti-independence politicians don't want to talk about when they tell us Scotland needs a fiscal transfer from Westminster in order to survive.
The bottom line is that the Westminster parties need the votes of people in southern England more than they need the votes of people in Scotland. If that means Scots will continue to pay excessive amounts for electricity in order to keep energy bills down in Kent, and to ensure lucrative profits for the energy companies, so be it. The message from the Labour Party is suck it up Scotland.
Scotland's NHS ready to treat injured Gazan children
First Minister John Swinney has said that NHS Scotland is ready to treat injured Palestinian children from Gaza. Writing for The National, he said that the Scottish Government is looking to medically evacuate children suffering from injuries caused by Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.
However, this would require approval both from the Israeli authorities to allow the children and their primary care givers to exit the devastated territory, and the British Government to give them visas allowing them entry to the UK.
With a Labour Government which is all-consumed with its pursuit of Reform UK leaning voters and which has swallowed right wing tropes about immigration hook, line, and sinker, the granting of such approval is by no means certain. The First Minister has already written to Prime Minister Keir Starmer urging him to support the evacuations to hospitals in Scotland.
With independence, Scotland would not have to ask permission to grant visas to wounded and maimed children. According to figures from Unicef, more than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured by Israel since Hamas's October 7 2023 attack. Swinney said he had met with the UN agency earlier this week to discuss medical evacuations.
In his piece for The National, he wrote: 'With hospitals destroyed and medical supplies running out, this is an emergency and a race against time to provide specialist medical care for the children and babies suffering from injuries caused by the war.
Scotland's world-class National Health Service stands ready to play our full part in supporting these medical evacuations and the treatment of injured Palestinian children.'
He added: 'This requires the support of the UK Government, and I have asked the Prime Minister to support facilitating a transfer of these children, who need medical care to survive, to Scotland.'
Israel has recently unveiled plans to corral over 700,000 Palestinians into a concentration camp on the ruins of the city of Rafah in the south of Gaza. The Israeli plan would see Palestinians admitted to the camp after "screening", they would not be permitted to leave until they could be permanently relocated to a third country.
The plan is blatant ethnic cleansing and as such is a crime under international law. Not that the Israeli Government cares, it enjoys the complicity of Western powers in its war crimes.