Scotland trapped in doom spiral of disappointment under Labour

The National

15 hours ago

WHEN it was put to him that his notorious Vow – which promised a federal UK within three years of a No vote – had failed to deliver anything remotely close to federalism, Gordon Brown infamously and patronisingly dismissed complaints with an airy: 'Look at the small print.'
That's a caveat which always needs to be borne in mind whenever the Labour Party makes a promise, especially a promise to the people of Scotland. You might have thought that anyone in Scotland tempted to vote Labour might have learned that lesson by now, but obviously not. Labour keeps lying and people keep voting for them. As long as they do, Scotland is trapped in a doom spiral of continual disappointment.
(Image: free)
In the latest iteration of Brown's, above, injunction to look at the small print, the Labour Government has yet again watered down its commitment to create a new publicly owned renewable energy company based in Scotland. The litany of broken promises regarding Great British Energy is long and dismal. We discovered shortly before last year's Westminster general election that the company would not in fact be an energy company in any commonly understood sense of the term.
READ MORE: Kemi Badenoch questions Reform UK and Labour 'belief in the Union'
GB Energy would not generate energy to sell to consumers, nor would it own any energy infrastructure. Instead, it was to be an "investment vehicle" for funnelling public money into privately owned renewable energy projects. Last year, Keir Starmer announced that his government would invest £8.3 billion into the state-owned clean energy company in a bid to invest in renewable energy projects and decarbonise the entire UK electricity system by 2030.
We were also promised that the new company would create 1000 jobs in Aberdeen, where we were assured that it would have its headquarters. It was clear by this point that these jobs would mostly be low level office based administration jobs, not highly skilled trades positions which might be attractive to the offshore oil workers who face losing their jobs as the industry in the North Sea winds down.
We later discovered that Jürgen Maier, the new company's chair, would continue to work from an office in Salford in Greater Manchester, which, the last time anyone checked, is not in Aberdeen. We also learned that the new company would not have its own dedicated office building but would share premises with other governmental departments.
Most damningly of all, we found out that the 1000 new jobs which the company was supposedly creating in Aberdeen would not actually materialise for 20 years.
As if all these betrayals were not enough, a new insult has now been added to the existing injury. It came out in Chancellor Rachel Reeves's spending review that GB Energy will now have to share the promised £8.3bn in funding with a new body which will invest in nuclear energy.
The Treasury's spending plans said that Great British Energy and 'Great British Energy – Nuclear', which was quietly renamed from Boris Johnson's Great British Nuclear a day before the spending review, would now split the funds, with £2.5 billion going towards a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors. This leaves £5.8 billion to be invested in renewable energy projects, a very far cry from the £28 billion which the party had been promising to invest in green industries back in 2023 when Labour was still in opposition.
In shades of Gordon Brown's patronising small print comment, when asked about the decision to hive off a large chunk of the funding promised to GB Energy to develop green renewable energies and spend it on nuclear instead, a Whitehall source told The Guardian newspaper: "This has always been part of our plans, but I think perhaps not everyone was paying attention."
READ MORE: Unionists just don't view the status quo the same way we do
So there you go. It's not that the Labour Party has been underhand and duplicitous yet again – it's all our fault for not paying attention to a change that Labour made in the dead of night, a change which they knew would immediately be buried in the media attention given to the headline announcements in the spending review.
SNP MSP Bill Kidd said: 'The fact Labour is raiding its promised funding for GB energy to spend on nuclear is shocking but not surprising.
"Scotland is already a global leader in renewable energy, and we generate far more electricity than we consume. Our priority must be a just transition that delivers long-term economic opportunities for all - not more nuclear.'
Tories trapped in a death spiral
The Tories are due to hold their Scottish conference in Edinburgh this weekend as the party faces an existential crisis. In recent weeks it has lost a dozen councillors to the Nigel Farage fan club, with yet another Aberdeenshire Tory defecting on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Tory group in Dumfries and Galloway council has disintegrated amidst bitter in-fighting with seven of the council's 16 Conservatives departing, four to form a group called Novantae – the name of the Celtic tribe which inhabited the region during the Iron Age – and three to create the Dumfries and Galloway Independent Group.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch speaking at the party's Edinburgh conference (Image: PA)Despite selecting a candidate who is a member of the Orange Order in a blatant attempt to appeal to the sectarian vote in the recent Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse Holyrood by-election, the Tory vote collapsed to single figures. They only narrowly avoided the humiliation of a lost deposit as their voters deserted them en masse for the even more vile Reform UK, which appears to be hoovering up the staunch vote.
With an unpopular and uninspiring leader in the form of Kemi Badenoch, and with Reform UK outflanking the Tories on the right, the Conservatives seem trapped in a death spiral. They won't be missed.