Drill, Mr Swinney, drill, and let's make the most of gas

The Herald Scotland

18-05-2025

It is surprising that our Finance Secretary has not listened to her Norwegian counterpart and adopted the Norse advice to drill, baby, drill and extract every last volume of gas from the North Sea. At 6.8p/unit it means that electricity (28p/unit) will never be competitive with gas.
Mr Swinney should give the planning approval to the 900MW plant at Peterhead, support the Rosebank project and ask Scottish Power to build similar units at Longannet, Cockenzie, Hunterston and Chapelcross to ensure the lights stay on under dunkelflaute weather conditions.
With carbon capture technology it will be a much cheaper option than the hydrogen-fuelled gas turbine project proposed by Nicola Sturgeon. After all, if you start with using renewable electricity at 28p/unit to produce hydrogen just what will be the final cost of energy from utilising such science-based projects?
Ian Moir, Castle Douglas.
McArthur deserves congratulations
Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur should be commended for his hard work in getting the Assisted Dying Bill through the first stage in the Scottish Parliament.
It is supported not just by MSPs in Holyrood but by a vast majority of the Scottish electorate. If there were a referendum on the matter the vote in favour would have been voted overwhelming.
Dennis Forbes Grattan, Aberdeen.
Relationship is not so special
I am in full agreement with the views expressed in Neil Mackay's excellent interview with author Angus Hanton regarding the mythical special relationship with the USA ("'How the destruction of Scottish jobs exposes how the UK is now America's vassal", May 11).
I would add that the practices outlined in the article are not new.
At one stage in my career I worked in Edinburgh for a company that was part of a giant San Francisco-based investment management group. When the dotcom bubble burst, they 'closed Europe'. No consultation and no special consideration for the Brits.
I have visited the United States many times for business and pleasure.
Whilst I am always welcomed and despite the common language, I have never felt I was in a 'special relationship'. On reflection the feeling was one of mild condescension and of superiority over the Old World, though many were obsessive about their European heritage
As we Europeans try to find our place in Trumpworld our PM regularly plays the special relationship card. I would urge caution and remind our leaders of the events leading up to July 4, 1776. It's not called Independence Day for nothing.
The truth is that despite the common language American and European values are very different.
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Many Americans like to think of the United States as the prototypical Western nation, the culmination of centuries of European experience and wisdom. And many Brits like to think of Americans as their close cousins – albeit loud-mouthed cousins they are embarrassed to talk about at dinner parties.
It is easy to forget that the United States was founded primarily by people seeking refuge from the ways of Europe and the British Empire in particular. The Founding Fathers of the republic did not aspire to emulate the Europeans at all – on the contrary the American constitution was largely about ensuring that Americans would not suffer under a European/British style of government. They worked to correct the numerous abuses and excesses they saw as plaguing the monarchies of the Old World.
In the intervening 250 years the constitution has changed relatively little, and while many European monarchies have been transformed into republics and parliamentary democracies the core values underlying these societies have remained significantly different from those of Americans.
At a superficial level we share many of the same goals: liberty, human rights, rule of law, but it is easy to agree on labels; the devil is in the detail and when it comes to the substance underlying these grand ideals Americans and Europeans are often hopelessly divided.
Despite the foregoing, Americans and Europeans probably share more common values than any other two continents on Earth. It is largely for this reason that we have become so mutually frustrated with one another in recent years: we tend believe we are essentially the same, to perceive a common set of values and we are left quite disappointed when we begin to realise how different we truly are.
Keith Swinley, Ayr.
Propaganda war in Gaza
How should we deal with the problem that is Gaza?
There is no doubt that Hamas harbours hopes of the destruction of Israel while the Israeli government is intent upon taking control of the territory of Gaza and forcibly removing the Palestinians from that area.
Currently the bone of contention centres round the provision of aid for the inhabitants of Gaza to prevent their starvation.
The propagandists on the Israeli side claim that there is no shortage of aid going into that territory and that Hamas is hijacking those provisions to their own ends while denying access to the food supply for the ordinary Gazans, the latter half of that statement intimating that the ordinary Gazans are indeed on the verge of a famine.
Those same propagandists say that Hamas controls the flow of information which is allowed to be made public to paint the Israelis in a bad light and also contend that Hamas embeds its members in hospitals and schools to make sure that any attack by the Israelis on such targets creates horrific headlines.
Just this week a pro-Israeli spokesperson was ready to abandon an interview with a BBC interviewer if the interviewer insisted upon talking about the shortage of provisions entering Gaza, which the pro-Israeli spokesperson claimed was no more than Hamas-manufactured propaganda.
That self-same spokesperson also pointed out that the presentation of an emaciated child on TV as a sign of the famine being inflicted upon the territory was just another piece of Hamas propaganda.
We must then wonder if that person would dare to suggest that the 22 children killed by a missile attack upon a hospital shown as wrapped up in winding sheets were just another piece of propaganda.
It must surely be possible to distinguish between what is being identified as Hamas propaganda and the savage Israeli assaults which inflict so much damage upon innocent Palestinian civilians.
Both sides seem determined to eliminate the other in what amounts to a policy of genocide.
Their actions speak louder than their words and the hapless Palestinian civilians are trapped in the middle.
Denis Bruce, Bishopbriggs.
Ukraine's fight is our fight
Russian governments have always been cruel, corrupt and chaotic. Every so often they break away from this, usually after a military disaster, and experiment with something less brutal but it never lasts, and they quickly revert to form. They are also prone to attack their neighbours with a view to conferring the benefits of Russian government on them which explains the determination of the Poles, the Czechs and the peoples of the Baltic States not to let this happen to them again. Back during the Cold War (that never really ended) the West was haunted by the fear of the armour of the huge Soviet army rolling across the North German plain and adding the rest of Europe to the Soviet Bloc. Perhaps nuclear deterrence was all that saved us from this threat.
From the start Ukraine has maintained that its fight is not just for its own freedom but for ours as well. In three brutal years it has all but destroyed the Russian army and, even if Donald Trump forces them to capitulate, the Ukrainians have bought us about five years to prepare for Russia's next big adventure. I am only too happy to see my taxes spent on arms for Ukraine. I prefer the Volga to the Clyde as a frontline.
When the history of this grim episode is written I hope that President Zelenskyy will feature as the saviour of his people and not just another tragic hero.
Ronald Cameron, Banavie.
Volodymr Zelenskyy (Image: PA)
More train ticket woes
Like Graeme Arnott (Letters, May 4), I've had a problem with the nonsense of not being able to book railway tickets online, by app or even a ticket machine.
My Saltire card has never been available from the huge drop-down menu on the National Rail list of concession schemes – eventually getting fed up with this, I queried it with Transport Scotland who told me that the relevant local authority, in my case West Dunbartonshire, insists that Saltire card concession tickets can only be purchased face to face at a ticket office or on the train from a ticket collector.
This ludicrous situation is made even more ridiculous by ScotRail's reduction of ticket office opening hours and the fact that there are frequently no ticket staff on trains.
Stuart Neville, Clydebank.