Shut the Stable Door...
Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 06:58PM The SNP Oil horse has bolted. Wouldn't it be nice to have an oil fund we could live from forever? Sadly it seems this won't be possible. The pantry is almost empty. The golden goose won't be laying for much longer. Peak oil in the North Sea was ages ago. Production is going down. Move on. We need to build Scotland into the fabled 'renewable energy power house' and export that energy to England.
Even if the SNP do ever get around to holding a referendum and then manage to persuade us of independance and we get it, and we do manage to stick some penies in our new national oil fund piggy bank - If the SNP manage all that (without getting distracted by some pressure group or another), then all we'll have is enough for everyone to get a wee 10p mixture each year at Christmas. And I want the latest cool new gadget every year forever. If the SNP can guarantee me the oil fund will buy me the latest cool new gadget every year for christmas for the rest of my life then I might be convinced. Till then I reckon you SNP folk need to get over it. Westminster wasted the cash. It's gone.
We should also be cutting our reliance on oil use and at least the SNP is U-turning in the right direction on the transport front. Delighted to see supportive comments about expanding the Edinburgh Tram line into an actual network.
Maybe once they get a taste for U-turning they'll adopt the Greens plans for a Land Value Tax too? If they can admit they were wrong on trams, will they admit they're wrong on the local tax issue too? According to SNP tactical voting who's worked out the numbers, there seems to be a majority in the parliament for some sort of new property based tax, and Two Doctors reckons there's already support in the SNP for LVT. Come on SNP - It's TIME!
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No-one told Calum Cashley about his party's change of mind though.
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Reader Comments (2)
Why do you play along with the media's shallow game of "U-Turns" etc?
For a start, this is quite clearly not a U-Turn on the tram situation. The SNP, if they still had their way, would not have had trams in Edinburgh but now that the trams are on their way, they need to be factored into future transport policy. And, clearly, some clever person in the Government has worked out that creating new tracks are good value for money, no doubt due to the fact that the exorbitant initial set-up costs are out of the way (a sunk cost) so future lines are relatively cheaper.
All credit to the SNP that they can make these decisions when they know full well that idiots will try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and paint it as a U-Turn when it quite clearly is not, as I hope you know fine well.
So if something's a U-Turn then by all means call it a U-Turn but let's not be silly about it. We'll leave the Main Stream Media to the rather simplistic labelling shall we?
Well Ok. Maybe I'm being simplistic. It might not be the full 180, but you have to admit the new 'pragmatic' approach to tram is lets say, a "change of heart" from the SNP. It's a welcome one, don't get me wrong. Afterall, they don't have to expand the network. They don't have to even talk about it. There's plenty of other projects the SNP would probably like to spend the cash on.