How the Middle East oil crisis exposes SNP's false claims about independence

It took me back to 2014 when the Scottish Government, under the leadership of Alex Salmond, produced a White Paper on the case for independence. Faced with the impossible challenge of making the sums add up, they just invented them.

The White Paper solemnly proclaimed that the “average price” of oil for the next five years would be “approximately $113 a barrel”. In reality, it never got near that figure on a single day during the period quoted. It was a complete fiction.

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Salmond’s chutzpah

Thereafter, the only time the price has exceeded the fabled “average” was after Russia invaded Ukraine, confirming that there’s nothing like a war to force up the price of oil. That is not a prudent basis on which to plan a nation state, as Scotland’s voters duly recognised in 2014.

At this distance in time and given the sad fact he is no longer with us, we can forgive – or even grudgingly admire – Mr Salmond’s chutzpah in attempting such an audacious con. But what of John Swinney, who is still very much with us?

The need to envisage a bogus oil price arose from a briefing which Mr Swinney, as Finance Secretary, shared with colleagues but not the public until it was leaked. It described in chilling detail why falling oil revenues would jeopardise an independent Scotland’s ability to pay pensions and benefits.

This was the warning voters were never meant to hear and Mr Swinney had no intention of telling them. It is an episode which may acquire future relevance – by which time, we can only hope, the “average price of oil” has subsided to normal levels.

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Lobbying Trump about whisky tariffs

A more recent example of Mr Swinney’s casual relationship with honesty when there is a higher cause to serve emerged from the unlikely source of papers which shed light on Peter Mandelson’s doomed appointment to Washington.

Ironically, these also threw up reminders of how good an operator Mr Mandelson could be despite the fatal flaws which should have stopped him being appointed in the first place. One such example recalled how Mr Swinney went to Washington last year to lobby the US administration on whisky tariffs.

Mr Mandelson was the perfect ambassador – anxious to help and strategic in his thinking. Mr Swinney, he advised, must play the Scottish card with Donald Trump. He orchestrated and attended a meeting between the two men in the White House. In other words, he did everything an ambassador should to combine British diplomacy with pragmatic support for a Scottish cause.

Mr Swinney stayed at the Ambassador’s residence, which attracted some stupid criticism. UK and Scottish Government officials worked closely together to put the whisky case to Mr Trump. All so far, so good. But then Mr Swinney came back to Scotland and created an entirely different narrative.

Astonished and outraged

On his return, he promptly called a press conference to criticise the UK Government and claim a better deal for Scotch was “not previously on the agenda” while he had personally put the issue “on the radar” of Mr Trump. Unsurprisingly, the people Mr Swinney and his officials had collaborated with in Washington were both astonished and outraged.

The interests of neither Scotland nor the whisky industry were well served by Mr Swinney’s behaviour. But it fell into a familiar pattern. For Mr Swinney, any issue is subordinate to another cause.

The priority was not to “get a result” – which would certainly have been Mr Mandelson’s, for all his faults – but to drive a wedge between Scotland and how it is represented.

Labour spending money in Scotland

There was a minor kerfuffle this week over a memo in which Keir Starmer said his ministers should feel confident about spending money in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland "even when devolved governments may oppose this" which was presented as some great breach of the devolution settlement.

It was no such thing. In Scotland, the modus operandi of the devolved government has been to take as much money as it can get its hands on as part of that devolution settlement then rebrand it as its own largesse, often in order to put one over on the UK Government which has provided it in such copious amounts.

Mr Starmer was rightly making the point that his own government should try to redress this by reminding Scottish voters, for example, about the source of the Scottish Government’s ability to spend £2,000 a head more on public services than in the UK as a whole. Or to spend directly on some of a Labour government’s priorities for every corner of the UK. Most people are more interested in the money than in the label on it.

How devolution can work

When the Starmer memo was raised at First Minister’s questions, Mr Swinney responded: “The lesson is pretty clear to people in Scotland: Labour is a threat to devolution, and the only way that self-government can be protected is through the fresh start that independence would bring.”

These words are worthy of some textual analysis. What he is really saying is that the only way devolution can work is by replacing it with independence – which is undoubtedly what he thinks and, in fairness, has been the sole motivator of his career.

Others should draw a different conclusion which is that devolution can only work when there are two governments operating in partnership rather than in permanent competition – to the point at which every issue has to be twisted and every statistic falsified in order to make them serve the case for independence.

If every mention of oil going “over $100 a barrel” reminds us of Mr Swinney’s longstanding role in that false narrative, it will be a minor consolation.