Westminster’s great Scottish energy rip off
Speymouth
In news that hasn’t appeared anywhere on BBC Scotland to my shock and surprise, that’s shock and surprise as in “I was shocked and surprised to learn that the Pope believes in god.” A majority of MSPs have backed a campaign calling for an end to rip off energy bills in Scotland. Despite Scotland being a net exporter of electricity and producing more than five times as much natural gas than the country consumes itself, due to the structure of the UK energy market, Scottish households pay the highest standing charges on their energy bills of any part of the UK. These charges contribute to Scottish consumers paying some of the highest energy bills in Europe even though Scotland has an embarrassing wealth of energy resources, both renewable and fossil fuels, which together are many times more than Scotland requires for domestic consumption.
Scotland as part of the UK is shackled to UK energy policy, which is reserved to Westminster, and to the British National Grid which was privatised in one of the last acts of the Thatcher government in 1990. The grid is structured in such a way that electricity producers who are far from the major centres of population, which in the UK are concentrated in the south and Midlands of England, receive less for the electricity they generate than producers in the south of England. Recently plans for a proposed off shore wind farm near Orkney were paused as the National Grid’s punitive charges make the wind farm unviable. The 125-turbine West of Orkney wind farm had planned to generate enough electricity to power two million homes by 2029.
Labour promised to cut household energy bills by £300 a year when it was elected to form the Westminster government in July 2024 but energy bills have continued to rise. The Labour government is more interested in attacking migrants and the disabled and promoting the paedo-adjacent than in doing what it was ostensibly elected to do. Instead of cutting energy bills, under Labour they have risen by £187.
In July last year, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband ruled out introducing zonal energy pricing. This is a way of structuring the energy market so that consumers who live closer to the sources of energy production would pay lower bills than those further away. This could have a massive impact in Scotland, not only on domestic energy bills, which could fall dramatically from being some of the highest in Europe to being amongst the lowest, but also on the Scottish economy, incentivising manufacturing companies and others to open plants in Scotland in order to take advantage of Scotland’s cheap and abundant supplies of green, renewable energy.
But the plan has been rejected by the UK Government, which fears that zonal energy pricing would result in higher energy bills for households in the south and Midlands of England. As part of the UK, consumers in Scotland are being forced to pay high energy bills in order to subsidise the bills of those in London and the South East of England. That’s part of the price of Union for you.
In the vote in Holyrood on Monday, 65 MSPs, SNP, Greens, and Ash Regan, who sits as an independent, backed a campaign organised by Believe in Scotland calling for an end to an energy policy which sees Scottish consumers pay the highest standing charges in the UK, to deliver a fair, transparent energy pricing system that does not harm Scotland’s economy. To provide a pricing benefit that recognises Scotland’s massive contribution to clean energy generation. To publish a plan, with committed dates to lower energy bills for Scottish domestic and business consumers, and to cancel all new energy price rises planned by the regulator in 2026.
Not a single MSP from Labour, the self-proclaimed party of lower energy bills, the Tories, or the Lib Dems, supported the motion. All these parties are content to see Scottish households ripped off by a UK energy policy which forces Scots to pay more in order to subsidise consumers in the south of England and are content to allow Scottish energy producers to be financially penalised by the privately owned National Grid.
Meanwhile, the Labour government continues to ramp up the pressure on Scotland to build nuclear power plants which Scotland neither wants nor needs. The electricity generated by these nuclear plants would be to the benefit of England not Scotland. Scotland would continue to get higher energy bills, and in addition the risks of radioactive leaks and contamination and doubtless be used as a dumping ground for the radioactive waste which these nuclear power plants produce. With Westminster’s energy policy, Scotland gets the worst of all possible worlds, and the anti-Scottish independence parties and their branch offices in Scotland are quite happy with that. They serve the interests of their London masters.
This week, in news that you likewise probably didn’t see on BBC Scotland, it was revealed that an underground bunker built in the 1960s on the site of the Dounreay nuclear reactor in Caithness had been leaking radioactive water into the environment for at least a year before the alarm was raised. Officials on the site have now ordered a search for other similar hidden structures that may be leaking too. The leaking bunker was taken out of use decades ago and left as a legacy structure to be dealt with during decommissioning. A report into the leak notes that it “was never designed to retain water”, yet by 2017, it was known to contain thousands of litres of radioactive liquor and had already been identified as a possible source of contamination at one of the site’s outfalls.
The liquor contained caesium‑137 and other radioactive substances. It is thought that a total of d 1078 litres of radioactive liquor escaped between July 2023 and August 2024. The risk of radioactive contamination from nuclear reactors is not theoretical. it is very real and has been shown to have happened on numerous occasions. Numerous radioactive particles have been discovered on the foreshore next to the Dounreay reactor, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The full decontamination of the site is expected to take more than 300 years. That’s what Scotland gets from Westminster’s energy policy, high bills, clean energy producers who are penalised, and radioactive contamination. With independence, thing could be so much better, cheaper energy, a huge boost to the Scottish economy, and a cleaner, greener country.
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