A Place to Stand

  The Scotsman published this short and sarcastic letter today and it was published as written.

The Conservatives have just started briefing that they will end all onshore windmill subsidies by 2020.
The SNP's long term plan for growing the Scottish economy is that we will build thousands, possibly 10s of thousands of windmills and sell the electricity to England, at about 3 times the commercial rate, when the wind is blowing. When it isn't England will sell us their spare power at commercial rates to let us keep the lights on.

Perhaps Mr Salmond has some inside information suggesting that after independence England and Wales will never elect a Conservative government & he can thus rely on them paying us these "Green" subsidies forever. If so I hope he will let us in on it.

Ref http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9336027/Subsidies-for-onshore-wind-farms-to-be-axed-by-2020.html
 
This need for continuing subsidy if windmillery after independence was the basis of the Citicorp report denounced by the SNP and discussed by me on ThinkScotland.

With 50 fewer Labour MPs the only thing that would prevent permanent Conservative government would be that there could be a UKIP one,  This is a pretty good argument for separation, but not from this side of the border.
 
  Bishop Hill has also drawn attention to the Conservatives' newly discovered disenchantment with the windmills they have been funding. I highlighted this quote and said.

"slash that giveaway by 25 per cent, then translated into plain English it means this: onshore wind farms will be killed stone dead"
Interestingly that is not only an acknowledgement that windmillery isn't a real industry but by how much it isn't a real industry. Keeping 75% of the subsidy will not be enough to prevent "stone death". By comparison even a relatively small subsidy - 10s of millions not billions - would be enough to create a buggy whip industry producing 10s of millions of horse whips annually, for the horses we no longer ride.