After a week in which the wheels didn’t come off the SNP bandwagon, but certainly loosened a bit, I suspect Alex Salmond must be secretly ecstatic about the current clamour over fuel prices. It makes the media ignore the 1000% rise in cost estimates for smaller class sizes (£40m -> ~£420m), the fact that the local income tax might be outside the competence of the Scottish Parliament, and the fact that the government’s replacement for PFI looks an awful lot like PFI. The SNP can instead go back to one of their core soundbites - “It’s Scotland’s oil”.
The essence of the point is that in other oil producing countries - Norway, the UAE, etc. - the tax revenues from oil have been put into capital funds, to be used to provide support for the country for ever more. In Scotland, however, this money has been plundered to subsidise the revenue expenditure of the rest of the UK. On a more immediate problem, Scotland produces 10 times as much oil as it uses, and yet has some of the highest fuel prices in the UK due to ’supply shortages’.
I bet Gordon Brown is wishing that a news story would come along to obscure the problems over ‘anti-terror’ internment, the mess the economy is in, fuel poverty and so on and return to his ‘core competencies’. The catch with that cunning plan is that with the economy going to pot he doesn’t seem to have any.
EDIT: Just when the whole SNP-Labour thing was becoming a bit dull, up pops Liam Byrne. Utterly. Fucking. Priceless. 