What does Scotland’s energy and Andy Murray have in common?

The announcement that the Westminster government has given the go-ahead for the Jackdaw gas field off the coast of Aberdeen was delivered with all the usual fanfare we have come to expect from Westminster politicians.

Standing at the St Fergus terminal, the Chancellor John Healey declared that extracting homegrown North Sea gas is vital for energy security, adding for good measure that extra tax revenues would be funnelled into a brand-new energy wealth fund.

Watching Westminster politicians suddenly rediscover the immense, long-term economic value of Scottish offshore resources is like an absentee landlord who spent decades neglecting the property suddenly offering a masterclass in home improvements.

For years, Scots were told by Westminster politicians that North Sea energy would be a burden to an independent Scotland – a fiscal anchor that would drag Scotland into ruin.

Now, when the Treasury needs to patch a gaping black hole in its own balance sheet, offshore gas is suddenly transformed into a golden goose.

It’s similar to Andy Murray ‘s tennis career: ‘Scottish’ when doing badly and ‘British’ when doing well.

To understand why the rhetoric surrounding Jackdaw has the integrity of a bridge made from plasticine, you only has to look back at the arguments weaponised by the anti-independence campaign during the 2014 referendum.

Back then, the ‘No’ campaign treated North Sea oil and gas not as a national asset, but as an volatile, toxic burden. They explicitly argued that relying on energy revenues would wreck an independent Scotland’s finances:

“There’s a high degree of uncertainty around future North Sea revenues reflecting considerable volatility in production & oil prices” – Better Together on X, 17 July 2013

To bolster their doom-mongering, Westminster apologists routinely amplified headlines claiming that North Sea revenues were on the brink of collapse and would “ruin SNP’s economic case for independence”.

The scaremongering reached its absolute zenith when mainstream media echoed bizarre, apocalyptic warnings.

In May 2014, a BBC news item reported that in just over five years Britain will have run out of oil, coal and gas. According to that logic, the North Sea should have been as dry as a bone by 2019! Yet here we are, well over a decade later, watching the Westminster government rush to drill Jackdaw to keep the money flowing to London.

Perhaps the most shameless u-turn involves the creation of a sovereign wealth fund – or the non creation of a sovereign wealth fund

When the SNP proposed establishing an oil fund – mirroring the spectacular success of Norway’s $2 trillion Government Pension Fund – the anti-independence campaign dismissed the idea out of hand.

They insisted that establishing a fund was a pipe dream because spending oil revenues on public services meant an such oil fund could only be created by punishing Scots.

They explicitly claimed that SNP oil fund plans would have to be financed by either raising taxes or cutting public spending.

They doubled down, telling voters that because we spend all the oil revenues on public services, setting up a reserve fund was inherently impossible without severe austerity.

Yet today, the Chancellor stands on Scottish soil and casually announces an energy wealth fund financed by North Sea tax receipts!

It turns out an oil fund was never “impossible” – it was only deemed impossible if the money was going to stay in Scotland.

This historic squandering of resources is hardly new as declassified documents revealed Westminster knew as far back as 1970s.

The McCrone Report warned the Westminster Treasury that North Sea oil would make an independent Scotland embarrassingly wealthy – with a currency so strong it would outpace Sterling.

Westminster politicians sat on that report for thirty years, whilst they argued the opposite, to prevent Scots from realising their own economic strength. 

Instead of building a Norwegian-style legacy, successive Westminster governments burnt through hundreds of billions of pounds of Scottish resources to fund short-term tax cuts and plug Treasury deficits.

The lies about oil were just one pillar of a wider campaign of deception built on sand. The anti-independence movement promised Scots that staying with Westminster was the only way to secure stability. Looking back, those promises resemble a series of comical fairy tales:

• “Vote ‘No’ to stay in the EU”: The central threat of 2014 was that independence meant losing European Union citizenship. Two years later, Scotland was dragged out of the EU against its democratic will.

• “The Vow” and more devolution: We were promised “near-federalism” and vast new powers for Holyrood. Instead, we have faced repeated internal market grabs, bypassed parliament, and eroded devolution.

• Economic stability and low energy bills: We were told the “broad shoulders of the UK” would protect us from financial shocks. Instead, we got Brexit-induced inflation, skyrocketing energy bills in an energy-rich nation, and interest rate spikes.

Listening to Westminster politicians preach about economic realism today is like taking lifestyle advice from Mr Bean.

The Jackdaw announcement has simply shredded more threads of the 2014 ‘No’ campaign’s credibility.

The arguments implying that Scotland is too poor, too small, or too reliant on volatile energy to govern itself were always ridiculous in the real world – refuted now by the very politicians who rush north to claim our resources as their own saving grace.

Scotland finds itself at a crossroads. We can continue to allow our vast energy resources to be siphoned off to subsidise Westminster’s economic mismanagements and systemic failures.

Or we can demand the democratic right to choose our own path.

This litany of dishonesty is reason enough for a fresh independence referendum.

It is time to put the choice back where it belongs: in the hands of the people of Scotland, so that our national resources can finally be used to enrich Scottish communities rather than bail out a broken Westminster Treasury.