WHAT WE COULD DO IF WE STOPPED SUBSIDISING WINDMILLS

Windmills are an expensive way of providing intermittent & largely useless electricity. We should, instead be allowing the building of new nuclear power stations which provide electricity in France at half the price of conventional power.

Apart from halving everybody's electricity prices what else could we do?

"THE GOVERNMENT’S GREENenergy initiatives, the Renewables Obligation and the Renewables Obligation,Scotland (RO/ROS), promise to raise £1 billion a year for electricity suppliers by 2010 through levies oncustomers. OFGEM estimated the cost to consumers in 2003-2004 at £416 million."

Bearing in mind that 3p off our income tax has been calculated by Westminster as costing £870 million which is considerably less than £1 billion it seems we could very easily afford it if we stopped this nonsense.

This would not interfere with any of the other things the 9% Growth Party is pledged to do. Scotland has no problems that could not be solved by having a competent government.

WHERE YOUR MONEY GOES

This contains pie charts of where the government raises our taxes & where it goes all measured in billions of £s. Scotland's population is 8.6% of Britain's & our per capita GDP is about 10% lower so I have also included this (7.74% figure (7.74%). I wouldn't stand by this but it is probably a good ballpark figure, except, of course, for oil.

Where Taxpayers Money Comes From

Income tax £157 (£12.15)
National Insurance £ 95 (£7.35)
Excise £ 41 (£3.17)
Corporation Tax £ 50 (£3.87)
VAT £ 80 (£6.19)
Business Rates £ 22 (£1.7)
Council Tax £ 23 (£1.78)
Other (capital gains, stamp duty,
vehicle excise
£ 84 (£6.5)
TOTAL £553 (£42.8)

Total expenditure for Scotland for 2004-5 was £47.7 billion (£25.8 billion by Holyrood) c/o Brian Monteith's new book Paying the Piper so adding 10% for 2007 I assume £52.47 billion. The UK figure is £587 billion which puts our spending at 8.9% (somewhat hogher but as I said i am taking no account of oil & certainly a far smaller deficit than the £50 billion the RU costs us).


Where Taxpayer's Money is Spent
Health £104 (£9.26)
Transport £ 20 (£1.78)
Education £ 77 (£6.85)
Defence £ 32 (£2.8)
Nat Debt Interest £ 30 (£2.67)
Industry, Agriculture, Employment & training
£ 21 (£1.87)
Public Order £ 33 (£2.94)
Housing £ 22 (£1.96)
Social Protection £161( (£14.3)
Other - public services, culture,
sport international development, civil servant
pensions etc £ 59 (£5.25)
Total £587 (£52.47)

COMPARING SCOTLAND'S GROWTH - SCOTSMAN LETTER

Scotsman letter today.

Peter Ellis's letter (23 March) comparing Scotland's growth to Albania's is wrong to say that theirs, at 6 per cent is the best in Europe. Ukraine (9.4 per cent), Lithuania (9 per cent), Latvia (7.4 per cent), Russia 7.3 (per cent), Belarus (6.8 per cent), Moldova (6.3 per cent). Estonia and Ireland have also had very impressive long-term growth.

Of course, many countries are doing as well or better: China's 9.1 per cent growth means GNP doubles every eight years.

However, the basic point is true. Scotland (long term rate 1.5 per cent), and indeed the United Kingdom (2.5 per cent) could, and should, do far better if we only attempted to make growth the priority these nations do.

All power to the Albanians where it is deserved, but I do not think we are unable to match or exceed them.

NEIL CRAIG

This is Mr Ellis' original letter on which I have commented. The growth figures are from Geography IQ Others will differ slightly depending on the year under question & counting methods - but not by much.

Analysis of SNP's economic policy ignores the potential for growth

This is an OPINION peace I had in the Scotsman in April 2005. It is still correct.
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Professor Arthur Midwinter is misinformed in his comments on the SNP’s policy of cutting corporation tax to kick-start economic growth (your report, 29 March). The case that all the SNP’s policies, specifically independence and the use of oil revenues, could cost £10 billion is arguable either way; but it is unreasonable to use this figure in an argument about cutting corporation tax.

As he states later, since our total corporation tax receipts are £2.1 billion, a cut of one-third would be £700 million. Scottish Enterprise already costs us £500 million, for less obvious effect, and Holyrood has regularly had an underspend of £500 million. This is, therefore, clearly affordable.

The argument about independence is a different issue. It is quite possible the SNP could become the leading party without persuading the electorate to secede.

He is also in error in saying Ireland’s growth preceded the tax cut. Ireland decided on reform in 1989, including cutting business taxes, and instituted it within a year. They immediately came out of stagflation.

It is true that in face of this success they repeatedly cut corporation tax to its present level of 12.5 per cent (and that the rate of growth further increased), which is what he is referring to in saying that some tax cuts came after success. But the initial cut came first - the relationship between reform and success is so close that it is not reasonable to deny that the one led to the other.

Independence and European Union membership, sometimes credited with responsibility for Ireland’s achievement, came decades earlier, and immigration (actually the return of generations of emigrants), not surprisingly, followed growth.

A point he misses is that the lesson the SNP has learned from Ireland is twofold. Not just cutting business taxes, but also cutting regulation.

Turning round our economy cannot be done purely by writing a cheque, but it can be done by a government willing to make the effort, which includes writing that cheque and backing it. Since each 1 per cent increase in growth means an extra £1 billion of national wealth each and every year, the gains to be made exceed the cost many times over.

I do not believe Scottish voters are too stupid or too shortsighted to understand this.

NEIL CRAIG

THE BUDGET

Corporation tax will be lowered from 30p to 28p next April - the first time the business levy has been reduced since 1999.

Corporation tax rates for small firms will rise to 22 pence, higher than the basic rate of income tax

The income tax cut is smoke & mirrors because the increase in getting rid of the 10p low rate exactly matches what we save with 2p off.

I have been calling for cutting corporation tax cuts to Irish levels of 12.5% for Scotland & also for the UK. Cutting 2p to 28% is a very small step but it is at least in the right direction even though there is at least half a step back in raising it for small business.

All in all no significant change.

Brown should have cut corporation tax by 3p, not increased the small business rate & made a specific promise that any increase in the amount raised by CT would be returned in further reductions. That would have cost very little more & had a significant role in improving growth as it would have established a virtuous circle of declining business costs. This would be in line with the Laffer curve predictions by economist Arthur Laffer.

WHY, BEYOND MONEY- THE 9% GROWTH PARTY STANDS FOR SOMETHING BETTER THAN THE GREENS

We are here to make the next generation of the human race more knowledgeable about how the universe is put together, more in control of it & generally able to achieve more than the previous ones. That is not achieved by hiding in a hole & wishing we didn't exist.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE BILL

Catastrophic warming is a lie.

The Climate Bill calls for a 60% cut in carbon emissions in Britain.
This 60% cut either means complete dependence on nuclear for our electricity & probably to manufacture petrol or a massive reduction in living standards. Obviously I favor the former. FoE's "it will not impinge too heavily. For instance, it could mean changing the fuel we put in our cars, or the way energy is produced at source, or more recycling." is completely dishonest, particularly for an organisation which expels people who suggest we need nuclear.

The big parties are trying to push this through because it gives them more power over our lives & they care not a jot about reducing poverty.

The Scots Parliament should have absolutely nothing to do with it.

The 9% Growth party will oppose any economically damaging climate bill. If passed we will campaign for its repeal. There is no justification whatsover for politicians using their power to lower living standards.

WHY DO CORPORATION'S PREFABRICATED HOMES COST SO MUCH?

Having pushed for the encouragement of prefabicated mass produced housing I was very pleased to hear:

Ikea flatpack home deal is signed


A £200Million housing project using Ikea flatpack homes is to be launched in Glasgow today.

The scheme will see 1200 family houses built over the next five years in Drumchapel.

As exclusively revealed by the Evening Times last year, around 40 of the properties will be Ikea flatpacks, the first time the Swedish company's prefabricated homes will have been used in Scotland.

advertisementSmart-living "Boklok" homes are a big hit in Scandinavia with their open-plan designs, high ceilings and large windows.

Today all the partners involved in the project were signing off the contracts in a ceremony at Glasgow City Chambers.

Summerhill councillor Paul Carey said: "Today we are giving the green light to the largest single regeneration scheme in Scotland."

On the other hand, since similar Norwegian houses sell at approx £40,000 (excluding installation) I was a little surprised at how much that is costing the corporation. £200 million for 1,200 homes comes to £166,000 each.

According to Boklok's site "BoKlok is aiming to sell homes in the range from a one-bedroom flat for under £100,000 to a three-bedroom house for under £150,000" - this is fully installed because "Will BoKlok homes be available to buy as flat packs from IKEA stores? ---
No. You will not be able to buy a flat pack house from IKEA". A not unreasonable position when there are so many rules in this country & councils knock down houses which, while well constructed, haven't done their paperwork acceptably.

Without such rules it would be perfectly possible to put one of these up for £40,000 for the unit & £20,000 installation.

GLOBAL WARMING IS A "SHORT-TERM CRAZE"

The smartest money in global warming stocks may be scurrying to the exit just when the enthusiasm for alternative-energy companies is at an all-time high....

``As an investment play,'' global warming is ``a bubble'' and ``social short-term craze,'' said Ken Fisher, who oversees $35 billion as chairman of Fisher Investments Inc. in Woodside, California.

Anyone looking for corroboration of that assessment may find it in the so-called short selling of U.S. alternative-energy stocks last month, which climbed 45 times faster than the average for Standard & Poor's 500 Index members.

SunPower, the biggest U.S. producer of solar energy, had the largest jump in short sales relative to shares outstanding in the Nasdaq Stock Market. Short sellers sell borrowed stock on the bet price declines will let them to buy back the shares at a lower price and profit from the difference.
------------------------
Note that this isn't even these managers betting their & their clients money that catastrophic warming isn't happening, take that as a given & anyway these guys aren't interested in investments of 100 years. What they are saying is that the global hype about warming is visibly about to burst. Next year all the politicians & BBC who are now riding the warming bandwaggon, saying sceptics are "from Mars" & that Holland & Norfolk are about to go underwater will all be hurrying away & looking for a new scare story to leech off of.

Course what do they know. If they're so smart howcum they aren't rich?

"NUCLEAR IS THE EASY ANSWER"

This is a comment online & unpublished letter to the Scotsman:

While nuclear engineering is obviously complicated the basic questions - is it cheaper, has it a better safety record, is it reliable, does it produce less pollution, is it far less visually interfering than wind or smokestack - are all easily answered in the affirmative which makes the decision what the Americans call a no-brainer.

Malcolm Slesser (letter 21st Feb) has asked for an impartial source to assit him. May I go one better & give him the words of an opponent. Nicol Stephen was willing to say, during the BBC "energy debate", that "nuclear is the easy answer" & that he only opposes it because it is so obviously satisfactory that if new nuclear was adopted the electorate would never be willing to shell out for windmill subsidies, If someone so resolutely opposed says this its superiority can hardly be denied.

ISSUES OVERVIEW

THE ECONOMY - We believe 9% growth is entirely achievable using the methods which have given Ireland 7% growth (cutting corporation tax & business rates & regulations particularly housebuilding regulations) plus a programme of building as many new nuclear power stations as there is demand for producing power at 1.3p per unit, which would obviously be attractive to business (& to all of us who use electricity at home).

Currently 55% of Scotland's economy consists of government spending, from almost all of which examples of waste abound. This is not sustainable in the long term & certainly couldn't be dine by an independent country.
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LAW & ORDER - There are no easy answers here & any party that says otherwise is feeding you a line. We would be prepared to bite the bullet & build more prisons. We would also consider cutting the age of criminal responsibility. As a general principle the law should ensure that punishment should hurt the perpetrator at least as hard as they hurt the victim, though it must be admitted that there are strong limits on what can be done here under Westminster & EU rules.

In the longer term there is statistical evidence that children without a father present, particularly boys, are considerably more likely to become criminals or generally anti-social. This is not something which can be altered either easily or quickly but we would wish government to incline more towards encouraging family stability & male role models who are not members of gangs.
----------------------
EDUCATION - The 9% Growth Party approves of education vouchers. We would allow schools as much freedom as possible & allow parents to choose. This choice would also extend to schools outside the state system & to new ones created to satisfy this market. In theory Catholic schools are difficult to ideologically justify but in practice they have, in recent years, produced relatively good results. We prefer a system that works to one that is ideologically correct & expect that such schools would become only one of a variety of schools available to people.
-----------------------
The NHS - The 9% Growth Party believe that the NHS' problem has not been money, but political meddling & the establishment of PC rules & targets. We spend 25% more per head than in the south. We would seek to see the separate health areas being free to set their own rules as far as possible with a transparent funding formula for each area & a free market between areas.

Currently decisions on the opening or closing of facilities seem to resolve themselves into an arm wrestling comprtition between local MSPs & MPs, whose duty is correctly, to try to get as much as possible for their own constiturcies but it would be better if such decisions were made by area management, knowing exactly how much money they have.
----------------------
HOUSING - "Affordable housing" has become a political code word meaning houses built by government, often to be turned into tied houses for government employees. This is not our policy.

A century ago houses & cars cost about the same & there is no technological reason why we should not get close to that again. Government planning is not the solution - government planning is the problem, They insist that houses not be built except in very limited approved areas - thus we have land rated for agricultural use on one side of a fence costing £2,000 an acre & on the other side rated for housing at £40,000 a plot (£320,000 an acre). They insist on using pretty much the same materials used in Victorian times, while cars are no longer made of wood. They insist on individual planning approval (& design changes) which prevents the sort of mass production technologicla breakthrough that Henry Ford made for cars.

We will allow builders to build, allow them to use modern materials, grant type & encourage them to invest in mass production off site manufacturing by giving type rather than individual approval & providing bridging loans on completed houses till sale. If the laws of supply & demand work, and they do, we can guarantee fully affordable across the country.
TAXATION - We are committed to cutting business taxes first, since in anything but the very short term an increase in GNP puts more money in people's pockets than tax cuts. Nonetheless we are committed to a freeze on government spending & the severe pruning of the most outstanding examples of government departments which are not providing value for money. For example we think most of the £500 million Scottish Enterprise spend would more successfully attract nrw business in the form of business tax cuts, the Executive has spent £12 million on a debt counseling service which which counedled only 202 people with debts totaling £3 million (both major opposition parties want merely to "reform" this bureaucracy, we would get rid of it) or Scottish National Heritage's hedgehog programme which cost £750,000 to get rid of 690 hedgehogs). We are convinced that after 2 to 3 years of this, depending on how fast the economy takes off, we will be in a position to cut income tax by up to 3p.

We recognise that some of the pruning will be painful & many special interests, who are not bad people, will cause a stramash. Nonetheless it is the duty of government to spend your money carefully & we believe there is very great room for more care in the way Scotland's government has spent our money. The lessons of the Parliament building are not preventing current waste. We think the Scottish electorate are mature enough to know that we cannot spend as much as we would like on everything in government & still have as much as we want for ourselves & we will not ask you to believe promises that we, or anybody else, can.
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IMMIGRATION - This is a UK matter & in practice cannot be otherwise. Currently Scotland has a relatively slight immigration "problem" due to the success of our current government in keeping up the relative decline in Scotland's economy. We are confident that, when the economy takes off we will not need programmes to attract immigrants. We absolutely disagree with calls from all parties to have special gentler rules for deporting asylum seekers here than in the rest of Britain. In the long term skilled immigrants such as doctors & scientists are people we should be both glad & proud to attract but, with the best will in the world, unskilled immigrants with families & little knowledge of English can add little to our culture or economy.
----------------------
IRAQ - Foreign policy is not part of the remit of this election & while we think it both right & in our long term interest that our foreign policy be based on the rule of international law, which the the invasions of Iraq & Yugoslavia clearly broke, we do not call on you to vote for us for this reason. On the other hand the Iraq war was sold to us by Labour on the basis of a lie (WMDs) & the Tories say they would have supported it even without the purported legal justification. The Yugoslav war was also sold on a lie (genocide by the Serbs) by Labour, Tories & Lib Dems. You may reasonably feel that parties which lie to you are unworthy of your vote & on that basis choose to place your vote elsewhere.
----------------------
TERRORISM - Terrorism must be opposed. On the other hand most of the damage terrorism has done to us has been through our reaction to it. For example the air security rules we apply to ALL passenger flights ensure that it costs £20 per passenger to keep bin Laden from landing in Tiree. This, in tuen, prevents the establishment of a successful air service there & elsewhere in the Highlands & does immense damage to the potential our tourist industry has. We should not allow ourselves to be frightened pointlessly.
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EUROPE - Again this is not part of the remit of this election. Nonetheless the EU Enterprise Commissioner recently confirmed speculation that our membership costs us £50 billion annually, mainly in regulatory costs, so we would prefer to leave. Wesminster government have always refued to do an official assessment of the cost to us, while denouncing the opinions of sceptics & would like Holyrood to produce an official estimate for Scorland.
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INDEPENDENCE - We do not consider "independence in Europe" to be either true independence or the solution to all our problems it is sold as. On the other hand there are circumstances, such as a refusal to allow us to cut business taxes, when we could support it. The main problem with a referendum is that if we came up with what separatists consider the "wrong" answer they would insist on another chance for us to get it "right" & another & another.
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GLOBAL WARMING- We agree with the, widely unreported, words of the President of the Czech republic who recently said that "no serious person" believes in catastrophic warming & went on to call Al Gore "insane".

It is a scam to get you to accept more taxes & more regulation of your lives. It is a scam perpetrated by the political establishment leading all the other parties.

This can be proven because it is impossible for anybody who believes in catastrophic warming caused by CO2 to oppose the only practical method of generating sufficient virtually CO2 free power - nuclear. Nonetheless those loudest in calling for you to make sacrificies in the name of alleged warming are the very people most opposed to cheap nuclear electricity. The mere fact that, despite all the predictions, the years since 1999 have all been cooler is also a bit of a giveaway that catastrophic warming isn't happening.

Thus we are absolutely opposed to Luddite measures carried out on the name of stopping global warming.

We aren't going to take it any more. If you aren't too there is only one way to vote.

SOME RECENT PRESS RELEASES

19/2/7 NO TO ROAD PRICING BUT MORE DRIVING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT ON IMPROVING OUR ROAD INFRASTRUCTUE

The 9% Growth Party believe that proposals for road pricing would be expensive & involve the sort of expensive computerisation which the government has repeatedly had failures & mass cost overruns.

We also consider that the civil liberty aspect - that it would give government complete information & ultimately control over where anybody who drives is - has not been properly considered.

We also point out that tax on petrol already provide, at much lower collection expense, a pretty fair analogue of congestion costs in that town driving uses much more petrol per mile than country driving & waiting in queues even moreso.

We have instead called for more money to be spent on improving roads. Currently the Scottish Executive are committed to spending 70% of their transport budget on 'public transport" which is largely code for railways, despite the fact that rail makes up about 2% of traffic. We could also call for money spent on rail to be put towards fully automating selected systems.

The Glasgow/Edinburgh "motorway" should be widened & instead of putting a bullet train between the cities a far simpler automated line running 24/7 with carriages leaving every few minutes should be considered.

We have also supported building a monorail to Glasgow airport for a quoted price of £20 million rather than over £200 million for a rail link.

Spending £610 million on a rail tunnel into Edinburgh airport when all that is needed is a moving walkway from the rail line that passes by is also a waste of money.

Open quotes for a new Forth crossing should be invited from the world's engineericompaniesies. We are convinced that a tunnel would turn out to be the most cost effective option. Norway has built 730 km of tunnels at between £3.5 & £11 kilometre & we have seen no explanation as to why we cannot do so here.

We would like to see the building of tunnels not merely under theForth but also Gourock/Dunnon. to Bute, to Kintyre, to Arran, to Jura, to Islay, to Mull to the Hebrides & if the £1 billion planned for the Forth crossing hasn't run out, to Orkney, Ulster & Man.

Road traffic is the most convenient & flexible sysrem that exists & it is government's duty to spend more of the money they raise from motorists on roads - not merely for the benefit of drivers but as one of the few ways the government can help the entire economy the entire economy.

13/2/07 CZECH PRESIDENT DENOUNCES GLOBAL WARMING SCARE

"Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor

it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses

Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.

Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?

A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing"

Vaclav Klaus, dissident, Czech President
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2007/02/12/20070212_161315_flash.htm

Perhaps Ross Finnie, who says anybody who doubts the impartiality of Al Gore's film, as we have, is "from Mars" may wish to retract.

The 9% Growth Party wishes to congratulate Mr Klaus, who is clearly able to recognise a politically correct lie, even when it is supported by a monolithic media campaign, when he sees one. One could wish that politicians not brought up under communism had developed similarly sensitive antennae.

Note that this was not picked up by any paper. This is unsurprising when you consider that his remarkable statement has been missing from virtually the entire mainstream media.

6/2/07 BBC ARE WRONG TO SAY WINDMILLS GIVE CHEAP POWER

This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.

During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil craig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.

At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfeveny & evn, in theory, without political bias.




2/2/7 IT IS WRONG & AGAINST THE LAW TO TELL CHILDREN GORE'S FILM IS IMPARTIAL

Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.

This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.

Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:

1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."

To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.




30/10/06 STERN REPORT

The Release by the government of the Stern report, with attendant media hullabaloo is being used as evidence of global warming. It is no such thing it is merely a listing of the worst possible cases in the event that the world temperature were to grow somewhere (anywhere) between 2 & 5 degrees.

In fact the total temperature increase in the last century was 0.6 degrees & still well within known temperature highs during the Medieval & Late Roman Warming Periods. With the mathematics of the Hockeystick Theory, on which the original IPCC report leaned heavily, having been proven invalid, & the temperature being stable since their report promising massive increases, there is no credible evidence to support a higher temperature.

The Stern Report does not mention the supposed costs of an increase of less than 2 degrees though this is obviously vastly more likely. This is because the effects of such a rise would largely be beneficial.

Perhaps not coincidentally the government are, at the same time, trailing proposals for massive tax increase to be sold to us on the basis of the need to fight global warming. With the Lib Dems having already made such proposals & the Conservatives visibly on the verge of the same we are clearly being prepared for massive tax increases in a Scotland where 54% of every pound spent is spent by the government. Whatever pleasures this might give the professional politicians it would increase poverty & have a disastrous long term effect on our economy.

The 9% GROWTH Party is unambiguous in saying that catastrophic Global Warming is a myth & that we do far more harm to ourselves through such fears than warming could ever do. With Kyoto costing £400 million a day worldwide & having, according to its own calculations, cut global temperature by 2 thousandths of a degree we, virtually alone, are offering the voters reasonable policies.



26/10/06 NUCLEAR POWER

Energy analysts Wood MacKenzie have warned that Britain faces the real possibility, though not yet probability of blackouts this winter because we are not replacing our ageing reactors.

There is no question that we will face winter blackouts on a massive scale if we do not replace our current reactors & the portion of our coal power that will fail to meet new emission standards the EU have imposed for 2015. In Scotland this amounts to half our electricity. There is no possibility whatsoever that this can be fully replaced by windmills, tidal, cabin capture. fusion or fairy dust within this timescale.
Whether we have blackouts & deaths this winter or not we will inevitably have them soon if we don't build new nuclear power before Hunterston closes in 2011.
Electricity has to be produced somewhere it doesn't just come out of the sockets by magic.

Every single "environmentally aware" politician & activist knows this. Every single one of them who has opposed nuclear power is quite deliberately guilty of killing 24,000 UK pensioners who die because of fuel poverty every year. Every single one of them will be as guilty of each death occurring during blackouts as Stalin was for the Soviet famine deaths. Such people should be brought to justice.

There is no excuse whatsoever for current high electricity prices which kill people & damage our economy & even less (if less than zero is possible) for the coming blackouts

At the spring 2001 Scottish Lib Dem conference the 9% Growth Party leader, Neil Craig, who was then a Lib Dem said in a speech that a failure to support new nuclear power "would be & would be seen to be grossly irresponsible". In reply Ross Finnie guaranted that the Scottish Executive would not 'allow" blackouts. Mr Craig stands by his statement & asks the Executive to repeat their guarantee.

ONE OF THOSE WARMING SCEPTICS THE LIB DEMS SAY ARE "FROM MARS"

Haclav Klaus

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor

it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses

Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.

Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?•

A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing

Obviously our media will mention this barely if at all (but it is going round the net) so they won't have to ask the likes of Ross Finnie who said anybody who doubted the impartiality of Gore's film was "from Mars" if he is really saying that the former world famous dissident & Czech President is really an alien.

2 PRESS RELEASES NAILING PROPAGANDA LIES

This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.

During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8

Neil raig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.

At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfully & evn, in theory, without political bias.

The BBC have not responded
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Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.

This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.

Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:

1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."

To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.

£12 MILLION OF YOUR MONEY

The Debt Arrangement Scheme (DAS), which helps people rearrange their debts so they can pay them off, was launched in 2004 as a flagship Executive policy to tackle Scots' spiralling debt. Since then, it has ploughed close to £12 million into setting up the service and supporting advisers whose job it is to deliver it.

Yet in that time, the advisers have helped Scots with a total of only £3.2 million of debt.

Politicians and accountants last night said the scheme was far too bureaucratic.

The Executive admitted the take-up of Debt Payment Plans was "lower than hoped for" but said it would be reformed.

The real problem with this is not just that it was ever done but that our leaders don't want to axe it merely "reform" it & that the Tories & SNP are barely better

Kenny MacAskill, an SNP MSP for the Lothians, said: "The idea is right but not the implementation ......David McLetchie, the Conservative MSP for Edinburgh Pentlands, said: "The DAS is a good idea, but it's not working in practice

No it isn't. If it is doing that badly it should be axed immediately not "reformed" & given another chance to blow another £12 million. This is the problem with our government spending having got out of control & politicians being afraid to grasp this nettle.

£12 million could cut business rates by 1%. Does anybody believe there are not 100 other government activities similarly useless which could be axed without harm? There is absolutely no reason why Scotland cannot have a very successful growing economy indeed if we let the people make use of more of the 55% of the economy the government takes & spends.

I don't think this is just socialism since David McLetchie mentioned as someone who didn't want to axe it, is no socialist. Though socialism is an 'ism that fits with state bureaucracy better than most. The problem is that there is very little incentive for anybody of any party to cut spending & a culture in Holyrood of throwing money.

It must be made possible to fire public "servants". Nobody else has a job for life. Beyond that I would like to see a cap on government spending. Any other industry expects to make efficiency savings of about 2% a year & government clearly has room for this. A 2% cut in real terms would be the equivalent of no inflationary increase. The savings should then be devoted to cutting corporation tax, business rates & income tax in that order. This would get the economy moving in a world beating way.

CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO - STIRRING UP APATHY

The Tories have announced that their Scottish manifesto will offer £100 million more for drug adicts & ...... that is about it.

THE Scottish Conservatives have decided to ditch a number of key policies for this year's Scottish Parliament election and concentrate instead on crime and drugs, it emerged yesterday.

Annabel Goldie, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, revealed she had dropped her party's pledge to axe the graduate endowment - the payment in lieu of tuition fees paid by students after they graduate.

The Tories have also dropped their policy of taking education out of the hands of councils and their commitment to cut council tax by 35 per cent for all households.

Miss Goldie also confirmed her intention not to offer any income tax cuts. Instead, the Conservatives will spend £100 million on drug rehabilitation and another £80 million rejuvenating crumbling town centres.

There has been much internal party debate on whether to use the so-called Tartan Tax, the parliament's ability to cut income tax by 3p in the pound, to lower taxes in Scotland. However, despite pressure from within the party, Miss Goldie has decided not to offer income tax cuts to the electorate this year.

Why would anybody want to vote for this? Scotland is in comparative economic decline. We have a depressing, incompetent Labour/SLD administration who can think of nothing more than windmills & nanny bans. Scotland is crying out for something new & all they can do is hide in a corner & limit themselves to a couple of PC tokens. They have given the SNP, ourselves & UKIP a free hand to stand for business tax cuts & Irish style growth.

One gets the impression they just want to get the election out of the way, lose a few seats & get back to sleep in Holyrood.

DIRTY TRICKS AT THE HERALD

The day following the Herald letter mentioned below they published a letter specificlycalling for a reply from me (in fact an apology) claiming my letter was provably wrong. The basis for that claim was that the writer said Scotland had already reached 10% of our electricity coming from windmills.

The true figure is 3-4% as everybody on the Herald with any knowledge of the field must be aware. Indeed a commenter on the Scotsman online mentioned it asking with amusement if I was answering it.

I had already done so & the Herald have refused to allow me any right of reply. I believe they have also rejected other letters pointing out this obvious untruth.

By using this writer as a catspaw & not allowing a defence the Herald have clearly made & deliberately maintained an attack on this party they know to be untrue.

If they wish to comment I will allow them the right they denied me.

HAS THE GREEN MOVEMENT KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN HITLER - YES

In many ways the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, about the way pesticides were alleged to be killing birds to such an extent that they would one day soon be wiped out, was the start of the modern environmentalist movement. It certainly introduced all the Grens' favourite hobby horses - unseen poisons, evil big companies manufacturing the aforesaid poisons, evil big companies lying about their poison being safe to make profits, catastrophe that ordinary people know nothing about but only the elite environmentalists do & the ever popular desire to ban things. Also the fact that the research denouncing DDT has been essentially disproved.

It was a hit & as a direct effect the Greens used their full power on western governments, who rarely object to excuses to throw their weight about, to enforce a de facto international ban on DDT.

By this stage DDT had already cleared malaria from the western world (the southern US particularly used to suffer) so they had no worries. Indeed the international campaign against malaria had managed to get deaths worldwide down to 50,000. It is now estimated at 2 million.

Since the supposed ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.
State of Fear by Michael Crichton

There are many other cases one could use - the 25,000 pensioners in Britain who die of hypothermia annually due to fuel poverty when we could halve electricity costs by going nuclear. 150,000 who die from black lung & emphysema as a result of the coal industry, African children who suffer brain damage or death due to lack of protein when we have, but are banning, genetically modified rice with high protein levels.

The Greens are usually portrayed by our media as an ethical cuddly if somewhat weird bunch. Just saying you are nice, in the traditional manner of Tony Blair, is not enough. A movement must be judged by what it does not what it says it wants to do.

The Green movement has clearly killed more people than Hitler & restricted human potential far more. They must be judged on that record.

HERALD LETTER WARNING OF BLACKOUTS

Another letter in the Herald today:

To say that windmills work 90% of the time, as Kerr MacGregor of Scottish Solar does (January 13), is true but misleading. The amount of power produced varies roughly with the cube of windspeed up to the optimum of about 24mph. Thus a 6mph wind does indeed produce electricity, but only about 1/64th of capacity, which will not keep many lights on. This is why windmills overall produce about 27% of their rated power performance. Whenever you see another politician saying that such and such new wind farm will produce power for 50,000 people, it won't. Even with "planned downtime" - which, being planned, can be set for when demand is low - conventional generators are vastly more reliable.

Storing power is less feasible than suggested. The only serious method is the pump storage system we use at Cruachan which loses 25% of the power put into it due to inherent inefficiencies and is, in any case, comparable in expense to a new conventional generator. If onshore wind is already twice as expensive as coal generation and four times as much as nuclear, the additional expense of building more pump storage facilities can be imagined. As Denmark and Germany have found, the inherent instability of the system means that it is very difficult to get windpower above 10% of the grid.

All our political leaders know this and know that if we do not now start building the replacements for the 50% of our power produced by Hunterston, Torness and the high-emission coal plants due to close in the next decade and a half, we are going to have blackouts on a massive scale. Windmills are an expensive token to give the appearance of action. Despite the hysteria, nuclear is the safest and cheapest method of generating electricity, as well as being effectively CO2-free. If more of them do not find the guts to say so, we are going to have many more hypothermia deaths.

GROWTH THROUGH CORPORATION TAX CUTS / THE LIB DEM ALLEGED ENTHUSIASM & THEIR EXPULSION OF NEIL CRAIG

A letter in the Herald today:

The letter from Iain McMillan of CBI Scotland delineating the constitutional powers of Scotland was interesting. I agree with him that Holyrood could do far more to help economic growth (over the last 8 years its "contribution" has been a massive increase in regulation, a massive increase in the state sector & increased business rates, the latter being very slowly removed)) without going for corporation tax cuts. Nonetheless in criticising George Lyon for calling for such cuts he gives no actual reason why they should not also be made. If small moves, such as business rate cuts, will do a little good surely big actions are likely to do a lot. Certainly the case in Ireland, which he does not mention, is that corporation tax & regulatory cuts have lead to 16 years of 7% growth transforming them into one of the wealthiest countries in the world even ahead of the USA. Mr McMillan gives no reason why we cannot do the same & neither, it appears, can anybody else. So lets do something.

It is also good to see a Lib Dem MSP calling for corporation tax cuts. Such a change of heart is welcome, if barely credible. It is only a year since I was expelled from the Lib Dems for the political incorrectness of having had letters published in Scottish newspapers, including the Herald, calling for such corporation tax cuts & also for replacing our aging nuclear reactors. Before the lights go out. The party executive unanimously voted that such positions were "to right wing" to even be discussed & "illiberal". Could it be that there is an election coming up?
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
9% Growth Party

This is the first time any newspaper, except the Glasgow West End Times, has reported my expulsion. It will be interesting to see if anybody in the party is willing to write in & defend their position - from previous experience I suspect not. I will update if they do.

This is also the first occasion when a newspaper has used the 9% Growth Party name in the address to a letter of mine.

A SIMPLE GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL NATION

This is an important article - a very well researched PDF of 68 pages of a statistically investigation of what causes economic growth.

To give away the ending the answer is ECONOMIC FREEDOM. Perhaps not startlingly unexpected but proven in great detail.

It was written for the South African government shortly after the end of apartheid & has, for reasons which may be those mentioned on page 10, not been absorbed by them. Since economic growth is far & away the most effective way of improving the total population's lives I would like to think that anybody invol;ved in government would at least make themselves aware of this.

POINTS

p3 Table of contents

P9 "When published data for all countries has been analyzed the correlation between higher taxes & lower growth (which exists in OECD countries) is not found"

p 10 "During recent years, simple techniques have developed for predicting probable effects of individual measures. It should therefore be easy for all countries to prosper, yet very few do, which suggests that policy makers in most countries:

Adopt sub-optimal or counter-productive policies unwittingly;

Do not use readily available techniques to avoid, identify and correct mistakes, or

Have higher priority anti-growth objectives." (since this report was prepared for the new South African government it seems itself proof of government not making growth a priority - this suggests that what is needed to obtain growth is to put it higher on the political agenda - precisely the intent of the 9% Growth Party & achievable without becoming a majority party)

p12 "There is no evidence that foreign "aid" has the potential to "make poverty history". On the contrary, the evidence suggests that aid may be harmful......The aid paradox is that to be a positive incentive, aid would have to go to countries where it is not needed, that is, where governments adopt policies that
result in high growth." (I would point out that aid recipients are self selecting as failed states statistics shown a correlation between aid & failure may be because more aid is the effect rather than the cause)

p13 "What matters, as far as economic growth is concerned, is not the characteristics
of rich countries, but of high-growth countries." The fact that Ireland & Norway are richer than us doesn't matter. The fact Ireland is growing far faster than us should be a lesson)

p 25 "Everything gets better with growth....
few people realise how much faster countries become much wealthier if they achieve just slightly higher growth rates" (indeed few people understand in their bones how fast compound growth in anything works)

p40 "Most of the world's top 10 richest or highest growth countries never had
colonies"

p41 "welfare states under-perform on average, which could also be attributable to the fact that welfare statism tends to coincide with other policies which compromise growth, Sweden being the conspicuous exception, where the market has been characterised by regulatory liberalism and privatisation." (I would also hold up Singapore have a cradle to grave welfare system, though one which is cost conscious, & has an obviously high growth rate)

p 43 "The world's experience appears to support the view that economic freedom may be a necessary and sufficient condition for prosperity"

p50 "Firstly, China cannot be thought of as a single economy or even as a single country as far as its economy is concerned. The diversity of economic systems within China, from one province to another, is bigger than the diversity of economic systems internationally. Secondly, almost all its growth (industrialisation, investment, etc) is not only confined to provinces with high scores on the "marketisation index", but to a few special zones. Thirdly, these zones have the freest economies on earth, if not the freest economies the world has ever known."

PP50 & 51 - China's 10% annual growth conceals even greater success. China is not an enormous free economy, it is a range of economies from Guandong province which is nearly as free as Hong Kong (& growing at about 20%) to Quinghai, whicheconomicallyconomicly free market than the world's least free independent country Burma accordinglyordeingly. China is "close to a controlled experiment in social science". An experiment which goes largely unnoticed here. This proves 2 things.

Firstly that 10% growth is not a maximum beyond which other countries cannot aim but merely an AVERAGE. If China has a province the size of European countries (85 million) growing at 20% then a mere 9% is fully achievable here (granted internal movement in China means the population is growing far faster than anybody would for the UK as a whole & this probably considerably helps growth). Applying this to the Scottish example it suggests that we can continue falling behind England & continue to see the decline of Scotland's population if we choose to do nothing. Or we can act.

Secondly that the Chinese "bubble" is not going to burst, indeed because the faster growing provinces are becoming an ever larger proportion of the economy we should expect their 10% growth, which represents the average, to increase.

PP 54 & 55 - Countries with high taxation levels are not automatically going to have lower growth rates than those with high taxation. This comes as a surprise to free marketists & somewhat less so to me, who at one stage was a great supporter of the state capitalism which really did produce high growth in the early days of the USSR. The reason seems to be that if government spends the money as wisely as the free market it will achieve at least as good results. To spend effectively government should (1) build infrastructure especially transport, (2) provide services rather than regulate (ie the NHS rather than smoking police) (3) do things that don't merely duplicate what the market does (don't run the railways) (4) increase efficiency by outsourcing & privatisation. To extend my point about the early USSR I believe that where government is bad is in the long term - because it doesn't have the spur of bankruptcy an efficient government enterprise will, over time, acinefficienciesficiences. I believe that is what happened to NASA & the USSR, both government organisations which once performed spectacularly & over time became mired in tbureaucracieseacracies. By comparison a Scottish executive which insists on spending 70% of its transport budget on outdated railways & prefers windmills to nuclear has managed to omit the first stage of the process.

P58 - Most studies find that less regulated countries out perform more regulated ones (unsurprisng) & that regulations cost the people 20 times more than they cost the government (surprising).

p60 - "The relative size of education budgets does not significantly influence growth"

THE SCOTTISH TUNNELS PROJECT

The Scottish Executive seem to have made up their mind about the need for a new Forth crossing. Up to now all the semi-official word has been about another bridge but the Forth Tunnel Action Group & Roy Pedersen among others have made a very good case that a tunnel would be faster to build, cheaper & lower maintenance. While a bridge will cost about a billion tunnels have been credibly costed at between £500 & £250 million. The latter depending on achieving the same cost standards as Norway has achieved. Over recent years, because of new bortechnologylogy, tunneling has become much cheaper - something the Norwegians have noticed.

This brought me to look up Norway's tunneling record & it is impressive.

There are over 900 road tunnels in Norway. The total length of the tunnels is over 750 km. [1]

The longest road tunnels (>7 km, with opening year and length)
Lardalstunnelen, 2000, 24505 m
Gudvangatunnel, 1991, 11428 m
Folgefonntunnel, 2001, 11150 m
Korgfjelltunnelen, 2005, 8530 m

Almost all of them built between 1982 & 2000. Clearly there would be substantial cost savings doing a lot of tunneling rather than just one project. IndeNorwegianina cost are extremely competitive. This goes into more detail on construction & cost

Construction costs for the tunnels which are now open are shown in Figure 2. All costs are based on year 2000 costs, according to price indexes of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication.
From 1992 to 2000, prices have increased linearly by 37 per cent. This is higher than the official price index. The reason for this is the improvement in tunnel standards, which has not been compensated for in the Ministry's price index.
Costs for planning and field work are not included for all of the tunnels. It is estimated that these costs are somewhere between NOK 2,000 & 4,000 per metre tunnel. This does not apply to the last tunnels which have been completed, where all costs are included in the survey.
The total construction costs vary from NOK 35,000 to 115,000 per metre. The Tromsasund tunnel is expensive because of its double tubes, whilst the Nordkapp tunnel is costly because of the poor rock quality in the tunnel.
The conclusions to be drawn is that subsea tunnels have become cheaper, but that rock conditions are decisive for the final price.

Since there are 11 Kroner to the pound this makes tunneling costs from £3.2 million per kilometer to £10 million. Even with multilane dual carriageway & motorways we are talking about a pretty fair saving.

Useful Tunnels Projects in Scotland

Forth Crossing - I firmly believe the Forth Road Bridge can be reroped for £100 million but with traffic increases an additional tunnel would be worthwhile.

Glasgow Motorway Extention - The present above ground proposal is costed at £500 million apparrently relocting costs & because some of the ground is said to be polluted by chrome. Obviously a tunnel with bypass outlets would be far cheaper & would not cause the pollution problems opponents claim to be motivated by.

Gourock/Dunoon - Much of Argyllshire is remote from the central belt because of long lochs & roads which need to go round them. The road distance between Gourock & Dunokilometerskilometres despite facing each other across the Clyde.

Cowal Penisula/Bute - A few miles south of Dunoon. With 2 tunnels Rothesay would be about 35 miles. A pleasnt commute whereas now it takes virtually a full day including ferry.

Loch Fyne Tunnel - There are several possible crossings leading on from the Dunoon crossing which would put the Kintyre peninsula within about 60 miles of Glasgow.

Arran - Either from Ayrshire (the longer & more expensive tunnel) or from Kintyre which could tie into the roads mentioned above.

Oban Mull - Makes the place accessible to 10s of thousands of Balymory fans.

Kintyre/Jura - Another almost uninhabited island which could become a one hour drive from Glasgow.

Islay/Kintyre or Jura - Direct from Kintyre would be about 15 miles, linking to Jura would be much cheaper. Again this island has a very small population because it is, by current methods, inaccessible. Islay is know as the Queen of the Hebrides because, being the most southerly & well out into the Gulf Stream it used to be the capital of the Lordship of the Isles. When the ancient Scots kingdom & later Viking lordship communicated by sea it was very centrally located but because our transport methods are now road based it is isolated. With an area similar to the Isle of Man & & more temperate weather, because of the Gulf Stream, it could be as prosperous if it were an hour & a half drive from Glasgow.

Orkney/Mainland - This has already been proposed. It would be expensive but Orkney has an oil fund & should be prepared to put up most of the funding.

Ulster/Galloway or Kintyre - About 15 miles from Kintyre, 25 from Galloway. A Kintyre tunnel was seriously looked at last century - the technology has improved since. I assume that Ulster, which would benefit even more than Scotland would put up a proportionate share of the cost.

Isle of Man/Galloway - About 20 miles. Man could reasonably be expected to put up the bulk of the money.

Skye/Lewis - Again about 20 miles.
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I don't say that all these will work & there may well be others where a tunnel would be a practical way from one glen to another. I do say that improving transport infrastructure is something where government investment almost always pays off. I can think of nothing which would so revitalise the Island communities. Check the map yourself for ideas.

Paying for it

The Executive have already talked of a Forth Bridge costing a billion & Glasgow motorway £500 million. This entire programme might well cost less. Beyond that the use of a land capture tax, whereby a proportion of the increase in value of land sales on the isles, Cowal or even Fife could be taken as payment. After that some money could be retained by local development corporations. Islay, for example has 3,000 inhabitants over 600 square miles so the land value cannot be high. It wouldn't take the building of many homes there to pay for a tunnel. There could also be a case for giving the development organisation authority comparable to that of the Manx Parliament. Home Rule did them no harm.

ANOTHER WAY TO PROVIDE UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

1) High resolution video record a couple dozen people each teaching the same college course (e.g. calculus, freshman physics, freshman chemistry, partial differential equations, etc).

2) Make those video recordings free or very cheap to download on the internet. Sell them as DVDs too.

3) Put automated tests on the web where anyone can test their ability to do, say, calculus, freshman physics, etc).

4) Have testing days where you can go to a room and say what you want to be tested in (e.g. calculus, freshman physics, etc). Proctors in the room prevent cheating. Tests are designed by the appropriate British professional societies. Then pay a fee and sit down at a PC that shows you the test questions (variations thereon generated automatically with different numbers and such) and you write in paper to figure out the answers. Then you enter the answers.

5) At the end of the test they tell you if you passed and with what score and that score goes into a database. You then can say you passed freshman chemistry or organic chemistry or inorganic chemistry or linear algebra.

6) Repeat process until the professional societies say that you have demonstrated your understanding of a bachelor's degree worth of chemistry, physics, math, mechanical engineering, accounting, or other useful topics.

Granted, this does not work so well for topics like Dramatic Arts. But it would save probably tens of thousands of pounds for each person who wants to earn a degree in an objectively measurable topic.

The idea is not original with me however it is apparent that, if this is on the net, it would be possible for anybody able to visit Scotland & able to paythe testing fees to seek such a degree. So long as there is no relaxation, if anything the opposite, in the standards required a degree from Edinburgh, or indeed Islay University would be desirable anywhere.

In many ways this is what the Open University could have been had it been willing to divorce itself a little more from conventional education. It is something we could do now.

WHY THE 9% GROWTH PARTY OPPOSES SOLVING GLOBAL WARMING AT 10th THE COST OF THE LEWIS WINDFARM

This Rolling Stone article goes into 6 pages on stopping global warming by proactive means. I am not going to reprint the whole thing (I have discussed this before) anyway but here:

Wood hooked up his laptop, threw his first slide onto the screen and got down to business: What if all the conventional thinking about how to deal with global warming was wrong? What if you could do an end run around carbon-trading schemes and international treaties and political gridlock and actually solve the problem? And what if the cost to get started was not trillions of dollars but $100 million a year -- less than the cost of a good-size wind farm?

Wood's proposal was not technologically complex. It's based on the idea, well-proven by atmospheric scientists, that volcano eruptions alter the climate for months by loading the skies with tiny particles that act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth. Why not apply the same principles to saving the Arctic? Getting the particles into the stratosphere wouldn't be a problem -- you could generate them easily enough by burning sulfur, then dumping the particles out of high-flying 747s, spraying them into the sky with long hoses or even shooting them up there with naval artillery. They'd be invisible to the naked eye, Wood argued, and harmless to the environment. Depending on the number of particles you injected, you could not only stabilize Greenland's polar ice -- you could actually grow it. Results would be quick: If you started spraying particles into the stratosphere tomorrow, you'd see changes in the ice within a few months. And if it worked over the Arctic, it would be simple enough to expand the program to encompass the rest of the planet. In effect, you could create a global thermostat, one that people could dial up or down to suit their needs (or the needs of polar bears).

By comparison the Lewis windfarm, which is not going to solve 1000th part of the alleged warming, is being costed at £500 million. Perhaps Scotland should just cough up the £50 million to save the world & be done with it.

Actually I would be opposed to doing this until we know any non-beneficial warming is actually taking place. For entirely different reasons a number of catastrophe enthusiasts held the same view:

Bill Nordhaus, a Yale economist, worried about political implications: Wasn't this simply a way of enabling more fossil-fuel use, like giving methadone to a heroin addict? If people believe there is a solution to global warming that does not require hard choices, how can we ever make the case that they need to change their lives and cut emissions?

This is also the Nicol Stephen reason for opposing nuclear - that if we solve this "problem" the common people will never again be persuaded to accept all the nonsense regulations & taxes we want to heap on them.

ELECTRICITY DEMAND COULD OUTSTRIP SUPPLY BY 23% BY 2015

The energy crisis is far worse and will begin hitting far earlier than the Government believes, a top power industry consultant has claimed.

A report from LogicaCMG states that by 2015 energy demand could outstrip supply by 23% with climate change and demand for electricity to power air-conditioning causing blackouts all year round.

LogicaCMG says its analysis contrasts with the warning in the Government's Energy Review which suggested that by 2025 demand could outstrip supply by 30%.....
------------------------
This should be taken very seriously. It is is grossly irresponsible for politicians to ignore this & witter on about somebody some day finding a working sort of renewable that might give us enough power or indeed about spending 5 years doing paperwork before we stat building new reactors. People are going to die in large numbers if we have blackouts.

SCOTTISH LABOUR FOLLOWS 9% GROWTH PARTY'S LEAD (at least a bit)

The news that Jack McConnell is willing to stand up to the treasury in support of corporation tax cuts is the best news for the Scottish economy for years. I never thought he had it in him.

This is certainly a great turnaround. For 3 years I tried to get the Scottish Liberal Democrats to at least discuss such a proposal & was eventually expelled, the party Executive having unanimously endorsed a report on me saying that such a proposal was "too right wing" to even think about (the founders of the original Liberal Party who were followers of Adam Smith must be spinning in their graves).

Last year, after the SNP came out for cutting corporations tax, the Scotsman published a letter from me (letter 25/3/5) saying the SNP were now "easily the most economically competent party in Britain"

Ireland's success in going from 2/3rds our standard of living in 1989 to 40% better off is astounding & more noticeable in Scotland than Westminster.

Nonetheless this almost complete reversal of Holyrood political opinion shows how, by trying the job, our politicians are growing from posturing ex-councilors to real leaders.

However to achieve Ireland's growth rate we need not just low corporation tax but also to reduce the regulatory thicket, particularly on house building, as they did.

On top of this news we have another report that Labour's Scottish manifesto will contain a promise that nuclear must be part of the mix.

Labour's glossy final manifesto policy document, agreed by ministers, MSPs and senior activists, is almost mocking. "No political party can be taken seriously on climate change if it refuses out of hand to consider any source of energy generation that is carbon free, such as renewable energy or nuclear."
.

Nice to see Scottish Labour trying to be taken seriously.

Seriously. Taking this together with McConnell's decision to go for corporation tax reductions if Northern Ireland gets them we are looking at, an at least nominally, sensible Labour party.

Lets not go too far - after all these aren't promises but just offers to look at, they are also made in a pre-election period when cynicism is justified & finally we have the experience of Jack's previous promise just before the last election, that economic growth would his "number one priority" followed by a full term of doing almost nothing. Also we should note that support of corporation tax cuts can mean no more than a token cut & that Labour's national nuclear plans still involve spending about 5 years deciding whether French & American reactors can be licensed as workable & Hunterston & Torness suitable as sites for new reactors despite the obvious fact that they have been doing so for decades. Since Hunterson is due to close in 2011 & it takes 4 years to build a reactor we obviously cannot spend an extra 5 on paperwork.

Nonetheless it is clear that we are seeing an enormous shift in the Scottish "political class" & that there is now, at least if manifestos are to be trusted, a large majority for classic liberal economic growth policies & if those SNP supporters opposed to blackouts say so, also for nuclear power.

If we can match Ireland's growth with cuts in corporation tax & regulations we can exceed it if we also build enough economical reliable nuclear electricity.

The difficulty will be keeping them to more than token acts after the election & of course moving "respectable" political opinion on our other policies.

SCOTTISH LABOUR MOVES ON CORPORATION TAX CUTS

The news that Jack McConnell is willing to stand up to the treasury over corporation tax cuts is the best news for the Scottish economy for years. I never thought he had it in him. Perhaps his recent visit to Ireland may have opened his eyes.

This is certainly a great turnaround. For 3 years I tried to get the Scottish Liberal Democrats to at least discuss such a proposal & was eventually expelled, the party Executive having unanimously endorsed a report on me saying that such a proposal was "too right wing" to even think about (the founders of the original Liberal Party who were followers of Adam Smith must be spinning in their graves).

Last year, after the SNP came out for cutting corporations tax, the Scotsman published a letter from me (letter 25/3/5) saying the SNP were now "easily the most economically progressive party in Scotland and, while they may not appreciate the honour, in the United Kingdom".

Subsequently new SLD leader Nicol Stephen came out for a fairly token cut in business rates which was duly adopted.

Unfortunately the Tories have entirely failed to enter this debate though to be fair they did call for business rates cuts long before the SLD.

Ireland's success in going from 2/3rds our standard of living in 1989 to 40% better off is astounding & more noticeable in Scotland than Westminster.

Nonetheless this almost complete reversal of Holyrood political opinion shows how, by trying the job, our politicians are growing from posturing ex-councilors to real leaders.

It looks likely that next year's election will produce a Parliament committed to growth, perhaps with a Labour/SNP Executive, the Tories playing catch up & only the SLD & Greens (whose reaction to the business rate cut was to denounce it as showing "to much concern for growth") in opposition.

However to achieve Ireland's growth rate we need not just low corporation tax but also to reduce the regulatory thicket, particularly on house building, as they did.

To surpass Ireland we should allow the building of enough nuclear power stations to fully and cheaply satisfy demand. On this Jack has an advantage in that the Scottish Labour Conference, without being pushed by the leadership, has overwhelmingly supported more nuclear.

I must admit to feeling very very pleased at this. I can't say if my early appearance before this bandwagon started moving helped much but certainly I was there & I would like to think it did.

TRANSPORT BUDGET

The Executive are committed to putting 70% of their transport budget into public transport which effectively means railways. Since road traffic amounts to 43 billion kilometers a year & rail traffic about 1 billion it is obvious that this 70% will be largely wasted, & that it is being done for purely political reasons. If the money was spent proportionately to traffic need there would be no problem widening the M8 & properly linking it to the Edinburgh bypass & that this would be far more use in making transport between the cities easier than the proposed spending of £3 billion on a high speed rail link.

We should put the Executive's transport budget under the control of a committee of qualified engineers rather than politicians, with instructions to hand out contracts on commercial terms & to decide on improvements purely on the basis of cost effective improvements in traffic flow.

REFERENCES
Department intends that 70 per cent of its transport budget will be spent on public transport in the nine years to 2010/11 (sect 1.6)

Scottish transport Statistics They only give the number of train journeys at 63 million whereas car journeys are only given, for some reason, as 43 billion kilometers travelled but assuming 16 kilometers ae the average, which is probably high considering most train journeys are to & from work, we get 1 billion kilometers.

EUROPEAN BLACKOUT

"A power shortage in Germany triggered a cascade of blackouts across Europe, halting trains, trapping people in elevators and plunging millions of homes into darkness. But the situation appeared to be back to normal on most of the continent by Sunday.

The private German company, E.On AG, said the problem began in its network in northwestern Germany, possibly after it disconnected a high-power transmission line to allow a ship to pass safely on the Ems River. But it stressed the cause was still under investigation.

Swathes of Germany and France were badly hit by the cuts late Saturday. Austria, Belgium, Italy and Spain were also affected.

The German power company RWE AG said a shortfall in supplies to the European power grid caused many substations to shut down automatically."

This is a sign that the grid is working at maximum capacity. A whole load of substations all trip out one after the other because each closure sends the next into overload. Any problem of "overdemand" is at least equally one of undersupply & in this case is because Germany isn't building the power supplies it needs because nuclear, the obvious one, isn't politically popular, & windmills don't work. That this is happening so early in the winter, in what is agreed to be a light winter, so far, is very troubling. With Scotland about to lose 35% of our nuclear & 50% including the high emission coal plants when new EU rules come in in 2015, can we be far behind?

And can we expect our politicians to accept that it is purely because of their own gross irresponsibility when it does?

STERN REPORT - BJORN LOMBERG'S DISSECTION

This is a review of the Stern Report in the Wall Street Journal by Bjorn Lomberg, the academic who started as a Green supporter & decided to investigate the case being put by the warming skeptics. On finding that they were correct he had the honesty to say so & got vilified by Gren eco-fascists as a result.

His review proves that on a number of points Stern has lied used figure from reports he likes while, presumably deliberately, missing out further figures from the same report which harm his case.

It can be read on http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009182

Since we live in a country where Channel 4 news can specific state that they "are going to report all sides" of the reaction to the Stern Report & then allow not one word from anybody skeptical, I suspect the mainstream media will be protecting you from hearing anything about this.

A CALL FOR YOU TO BECOME ACTIVE IN POLITICS - Preferably 9% GROWTH but whatever party you choose - Democracy doesn't come free - we have to work at it

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.
--Plato

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
--Mark Twain

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
_ Pericles


http://www.toolz4schoolz.com/misc-government.shtml
Other political quotes worth reading. I would be interested in any others.

ONLY 28% OF CIVIL SERVANTS THINK SCOTLAND HAS SOUND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

This recent article in Scotland on Sunday reported how, in their assessments 99.6% of Scottish civil servants found themselves to be either effective or exceptional.

Further down, after pointing out that even within the service this was found embarassing was this

The report comes in the wake of another internal survey which found growing concern within the civil service that it was not performing well. Only 27% of civil servants believed that the Executive makes good use of public money.

The survey found that only half believed any checks were made before money was spent. Only 28% of staff said they believed there was a culture of sound financial management.

Previously the 9% Growth Party has said that we could achieve major efficieny improvements merely by modern management, not hiring into Ministries which have not achieved a 2% shrinkage annually & freezing spending. Almost any private industry expects to achieve productivity increases of 2% a year.

This news of a major lack of financial control suggests that there is even more room for improvement than previously thought.

INDEPENDENCE - SoS LETTER

Last week Scotland on Sunday did an article about independence possibly being inevitable. Written more in terms of relaxing to the inevitable than pleasure:

Such a scenario is currently being painted by former SNP MSP Mike Russell who, along with businessman Dennis MacLeod, has written 'Grasping the Thistle', a 250-page prospectus charting a new way forward for the independence movement. The pair contend that the gradualist approach is the only possible route. "What we may need," they argue, "is devolution stage two, a necessary staging post on the way to the future. Some might call such a staging post a New Union - a constitutional watering station which allows Scots to continue to move forward, works as a means of persuading those who are still reluctant and opens up new opportunities by removing the economic disadvantages of the old Union."

All matters reserved to Westminster would be devolved to Holyrood, apart from foreign affairs and military command, they suggest. By doing so, the Scots - and the English - would have a chance to test the waters before deciding whether to make the break.

I put up a comment

The status quo is not an option if only because the English correctly feel that Scots voters have more power than English ones.

A fully federal system whereby England had its own Parliament, or better yet several regional ones would be best. Federation allows each unit to try different solutions to similar problems & find which works best (this is known as the scientific method). In that case unsuccessful solutions can be as useful a learning experience as successful ones. Despite the complacent Labour view that our economy is somehow doing well, we have been very successful at providing 'orrible warnings.

The SNP also believe in federalism it is just that their federation would be led from Brussels & Scotland would be an even smaller & more powerless part of it.

Which is pretty much my position. I do not exclude independence from England if it is clearly to our advantage or we are forced into it by English Tory intransigence (many southern Tories are licking their lips at the thought of a UK without Scots Labour voters), but believe we have so very much more in common with England & Wales than the EU states that a Federation of Great Britain is the preferable solution. I do not see the point of a Scotland as a "separate" part of the EU.

Yesterday I got an email from Scotland on Sunday saying they were producing a follow up article tomorrow using some email comment & that mine were "among those that stood out". I'll look forward to it.

FOLLOW UP
This is the letter on the letters page rather than part of an article. It is under a photo of a slatire & a headline calling for independence despite the letter not doing that. http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1526382006#new

OFFICIAL COST OF EU REGULATION

Whether one approves of EU membership or not this statement from an EU official should get wider reporting

He said new evaluation methodology of the administrative costs of EU legislation - including "gold plating" of laws by some member states - put the annual burden for business at up to €600bn ($756bn, £405bn) compared with the original estimate of €320bn. That figure does not include the compliance costs of the laws.

Proportionately this should be about £50 billion for the UK (or £800 per person) plus the money we pay for membership.

For some reason Westminster has always disagreed with estimates of the cost of EU membership but declined to produce an official figure. This is a situation where Holyrood would be able to produce an official estimate of costs for Scotland.

30 SHOWCASE TECHNOLOGICAL PROPOSALS FOR SCOTLAND

These are 30 aspirations (an electoral codeword for promises that you won't be held to) for Scotland.

They definitely do not take priority over cutting business taxes & more direct methods of growing the econmy. They are more like the icing on the cake of economic success. Nonetheless since some cost nothing, the vast majority are relatively cheap, by the standards of Holyrood, & all but the 30th (which is really the seed for an internationaly funded venture, albeit started here) could together be achieved for the same cost as the LDs proposed £3 billion Glasgow-Edinburgh bullet train they are definitely practical as well as visionary.

Some of these are also variants on policies mentioned elsewhere & indeed #2 is a zero cost pedestrian alternative to part of #21.


Zero or negative cost

1) Instead of paying for the Red Road flats to be demolished give them to their occupants, on condition they sign up to a good factoring agreement. Any unoccupied flats or where the occupants choose to be rehoused rather the ownership to be offered free to neighbours or sold at auction. These flats used to be Europe's highest & are still impressive. It would be interesting to see if private owners & private enterprise can run them morsuccessfullyly than the Council or GHA. Require the samofferer to be made for any other blocks of flats which GHA wish to demolish.

2) Paint a big orange line along the pavement between Glasgow Central & Queen St stations with the distance in metres written so that strangers know the way.

3) Immediately allow First the right to run a hovercraft across the Forth to Edinburgh - skip planning controls,
environmental impact statements, inspections, long lunches discussing it etc etc. 16

Under £100,000 (administrationion costs only)

4) Run a public competition for proposals to showcase technology projects costing under £1 million.

5) Invite tenders for the building of an arcology (a town enclosed as a single building) of 10,000 homes somewhere in the Highlands or Borders with a low population. Such an arcology not to be subject to any planning permission but must carry long term building insurance.

6) Pass a motion in Holyrood stating that we have a national goal that Scots should be at the cutting edge of scientific achievement & Scotland should, proportionately to our size, contribute to space development at least as much as any nation even Singapore.

Under £1 million

7) Add a glass bridge between the 2 towers of Kelvingrove Museum. This was actually proposed but turned down on the grounds that it was not in keeping with the Victorian architecture of the building. I personally think that maintaining Victorian traditions, in architecture or otherwise, is part of our problem. I also
think walking such a semi-invisible bridge would be an experience well worth having.

If, since the revamp of Kelvin Gallery is already complete,this cannot be done there may be other projects which could similarly be made memorable.

8) Put online video cameras on the top 100 sites of scenic or historic interest in Scotland.

9) Organise & put up prize money for an annual Road from The Isles hovercraft race - starting from Portree in Skye & going by sea to Blackwater reservoir, Loch Rannoch, Loch Tummell to end at Pitlochry. I personally think such a race, apart from encouraging individual engineering & Highland tourism has the potential to be
more exciting than Grand prix racing.

£1 million to £5 million

10) Establish an International Space Law Institute with regular conferences. The objective being to work out rules which will enable private enterprise to work in outer space.

11) Build a copy of the Skylon in George Square (The Skylon was a 300 ft needle held in place by suspension wires built for the Festival of Britain & demolished in an act of political malice & vandalism by the incoming Tory government - it is perhaps the only truly "iconic" building which has been demolished - it should be possible to replace it in even more modern materials held up by carbon nanotubes for a
relatively small cost.

12) Replace the TV tower at Livinston with a taller tower up to 3,000ft above sea level with a a lift going up to reinforced glass platform, or platforms from which you would be able to see most of Scotland up to the Highlands. Put a major visitors centre at the base with interactive exhibits & around a map of Scotland in the floor illustrated by photos taken from the platform.

13) Place a lasar in central Edinburgh & another in Glasgow & 1 hour after sunset to 1 hour before dawn have their beams cross about 5 miles up midway between purely for the fun of it. (This will require health & Safety approval).

14) Build a Buckydome cover to McCaig's folly in Oban, make it watertight & add floors, provide a moving staircase to it & turn it into a visitors centre for the history of the lordship of the Isles, with a view of the islands from the dome. For this to be able to achieve the necessary popularity it necessary to have already automated the rail line.

15) Roof over the pedestrian area of Glasgow. Sauchiehall ST, Buchanan St, Gordon St, Argyll st possibly also providing walkways at first floor level. Thus giving the whole area many of the benefits of mall shopping without destroying the traditional appearance.

16) Establish an equivalent to the Nobel prizes in subjects not covered by the Nobels because they didn't exist back then. eg Computer programming, space engineering, nanotechnology, genetic design

17) Provide legal aid to individual inventors to register patents worldwide(repayable if the patent proves sufficiently profitable).

£5 million to £20 million

18) Give a £20 million X-Prize for the first Scots probe soft landing on an asteroid.

19) Build an automated monorail from Glasgow Airport to Paisley Gilnmour St station thus providing speedy access to both Glasgow Central & Prestwick Airport. An offer to quote for this at about £20 million has already been made by Ultra but the Scottish Executive have decided that they would rather have a conventional rail link direct to Central at +£200 million. The reason given being that since their option
would avoid transferring from one system to another it is worth the extra money.

20) Fully automate Glasgow's Underground. Docklands Light Rail is able to work without drivers & running such a system is very easily within the capacity of modern computer systems. Such systems are even being considered for running road traffic which involves many orders of magnitude more decisions. A fully automated system would be able would allow many more carriages to run & 24 hour running because not limited by driver availability. It would thus also have considerably higher carrying capacity & lower running costs.

21) Build a Glasgow monorail. Minimum from Central to Queen St, maximum - from Buchanan St opposite Queen St on up to Sauchiehall St out to the west end, Byres Rd & either Partick station, or along Gt Western Rd to Anniesland or to Maryhill shopping centre.

Up to £100 million

22) Make a 5 hour DVD of Scotland's history. Hire somebody, not part of Scotland's small media, probably from Discovery Channel, to put it together, print up 200 million (at 10p a shot), give it out in Scots newagents & post 1 to every household in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealnd & the USA. Produce a permanent online
library of Scots history articles & accessible acceesible free & with links provided on the DVD.

23) Automate the Glasgow-Edinburgh train on the lines previously discussed with the Glasgow Underground. While the computerisation should still be fairly cheap, in some ways cheaper because rolling stock which cannot be updated could still be transferred to other lines, an impractical operation on the Underground. However if the trains are to be run on the basis of single carriages roughly once a minute some redesigning of platforms would be required. This would not be as fast as a bullet train but, because carriages would leave every minute rather than every 15 it would save an average of 7 minutes. Unlike the Bullet Train it would still be able to stop at Falkirk & Haymarket from which half of current journeys either start or end(alternately only some carriages need do so allowing through carriages to cut times further). It could also be easily linked to Turnhouse Airport by a connecting line. In practice, a much cheaper 24 hour automated system should carry many more people between Glasgow & Edinburgh than a bullet train.

24) Build an automated overhead monorail from the far side of the Forth Rail Bridge to Prince's St in Edinburgh. Use the fact that the rail bridge was, because of the Tay Bridge disaster, a heavily overengineered structure & should be easily able to bear the load of a monorail above the rail tracks. An overhead monorail into Edinburgh would not be subject to traffic jams as trolleys are & have the same cost savings as other automated rail.

25) Provide an automated walkway from Turnhouse airport to stations on both adjoining lines or, if the Glasgow/Edinburgh link is built build a loop to the main terminal.

£100 million to £1 billion

26) Widen the M8 & connect it as motorway to the Edinburgh bypass.

27) Build a deep ocean thermal differential power generator & use it to build a permanent sea base owned by Scotland. (See http://www.4literature.net/story/2002/7/28/115247/145

28) Provide bursaries of £10,000 per person & £30,000 per school for the top thousand Higher results in maths & hard sciences. (£40 million a year, £400 in 10 years)

Over £1 billion

29) Automate all of Scotland's train services. This can be done over a period of years. Scotland has a relatively limited rail track & this is something in which we could easily become a world leader. A particular line for upgrading would be the West Highland Line from Glasgow low level to Loch Lomond, Oban & ultimately Fort William. This line has only very few trains per day & thus id relatively simple to automate. If run by an automated system it would be possible to run carriages regularly all 24 hours a day making the Highlands fully accessible from the Central Belt & vice versa. Another advantage of an automated system is that it would make movement of containers in single units practical making them fully competitive with roads.

30) Establish an X-Prize commission giving the full Moon and solar power satelite prizes proposed by www.jerrypournelle.com (Friday post) but only applicable to fully Scots programmes. Offer to make this an international prize compatible with any other country or federative state (eg individual US states) willing to join the fund & contribute proportionately to their GNP. Initially this can be funded by devoting any increase in the Scots Lottery profits plus £49 million (equivalent of our ESA contribution plus any private donations matched by an equal government contribution.

In fact since awarding X-Prizes, or ony other sort, doesn't cost anything unless somebody wins them & it is improbable that the entire world space effort could be organised from Scotland it is highly unlikely that anybody would immediately win a prize for a Moon landing from Scotland. The real effect of this would be to encourage other nations to also join in in this scheme making the x-Prize organisation & the new space race a truly international enterprise albeit growing from a seed planted by Scots.