Meeting of the Parliament 05 March 2025
Funnily enough, I was just going to come to the London financial sector. We have been promised that Scotland’s wealth flowing south to be invested in London would pull the rest of us up, and that, thanks to the broad shoulders of the UK, we would all march into the sunlit uplands of imperial splendour, but the exact opposite has happened. Since Thatcher began the campaign of using Scotland’s wealth to turn the City of London into a global financial centre, the cold war has ended and we have watched the iron curtain fall. However, it is the small eastern European nations that strode on to the world stage as independent countries that are marching to the sunlit uplands, and not the UK nations and regions. The GDP per capita of the median UK region now sits snugly between the median regions in the former eastern bloc countries of Lithuania and Slovenia. It is a plain fact that, over the past decades, we have been dragged down while those independent European nations have pulled themselves up.
However, the new Labour UK Government, rather than accepting that the policy of London and the south-east first has failed, is just as determined as Thatcher was to continue down the path of failure that will see Scotland’s potential continue to be smothered. What Thatcher began with miners and steelworkers, Starmer is determined to finish with oil and gas workers, with little investment in a just transition.
Last year, we began with a promise of £28 billion of investment in the new green economy. However, the investment—and the jobs that go with it—has disappeared like sna aff a dyke. The much-vaunted GB Energy commitment to Aberdeen has now been reduced to a shared office and the promise of a few hundred jobs that will arrive some time in the next 20 years. Of course, we can also ask: where is the money for the Acorn carbon capture and storage project?
Meanwhile, investment in London continues apace, with the total UK capital spend per person in London being £2,237 last year, in comparison with the figure of £1,789 per person in Scotland. Can we really be surprised that decades of starving investment in Scotland to fund even higher spending in the London bubble results in London increasing its lead at the expense of Scotland?
Although the data from the OECD undeniably shows that years of investment in London has not served Scotland or other UK nations and regions well, it does not tell us why. For that, we need to look at the factors involved in production, which include land, labour and capital. Quite simply, land and labour in London are among the most expensive in the world, and that requires ever-increasing amounts of capital investment to compensate. That means that vital capital investment is going not towards actually growing the economy but simply to cancel out the negative factors of costly land and labour.
That is because, fundamentally, London does not have the land to support its economy, and every natural resource, from energy to food and water, must be shipped there from somewhere else. Given that Scotland is the source of much of the natural resources that London uses, London is benefiting from our fruits of production in a way that we are not. It gets worse year on year, with every bit of growth that is eked out of London making the resource deficit worse.
We can debate the historical merits—although I would rather not—of investing in London during the days of empire but, either way, those days are gone. It is clear that, for many years, investing in London and the south-east has been a long-term drag on Scotland and other UK nations and regions. Given that, would it not be better to use our own fruits of production to grow our economy in Scotland?
I understand that long-term steady growth in Scotland is not that attractive to politicians in the Westminster bubble, with their eyes on the imperial capital and the next election, and their desperation to stay in their jobs. For them, the quick buck from throwing ever-increasing amounts of money into London and the south-east is much more attractive, but that is exactly why we are in the position that we are. Years of Westminster short-termism have been causing long-term pain for no gain. It is time for independence.
15:44