A Place to Stand

   I had this letter published on Monday by the Metro. Quite surprised since it was written to get annoyance off my chest rather than expectation of publication. As the last and second last lines show - I thought any journalist would delete both of them but in fact the Metro kept in the 2nd last and I have thus boldended the last.

The SNP have decided to spend £2.6 million on building 250 power points for electric cars. There are believed to be 60 electric cars in Scotland. That is a subsidy of £43,000 per car.

Yet more proof that the SNP are ideological subsidy junkies, deliberately trying to create the world's highest electricity prices and actively preventing Scotland ever getting out of recession.

This is now clearly something no remotely honest SNP supporter, party member or journalist, can now deny or ignore and indeed which no remotely honest one has.

Whatever one thinks of their Green referendum allies at least they have the honesty to say they do not want an end to recession. 

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  The Metro don't do the deeply intellectual debates the Scotman and Herald aspire to. As an example of their house style my letter just had the signature "Neil" though I had included the full thing, including UKIP membership. But it was the letter of the day.

   In their praise let me say that the Metro regularly have sensible science articlse, not complicated but correct, understandable, and apolitical which is something I would not look for in the Guardian.

   Also in an era when papers are whining about losing readers to the "unfair" internet competition it is good to see a paper that has a successful business model. I suspect my letter reached a larger readership than it would in the Scotsman or Guardian.

   Incidentally this news from the Edinburgh Evening News confirms the SNP know perfectly well what a fraudulent rip off that £2.6 million is:

"John Curtis, former head of low carbon vehicles and fuels at Transport Scotland, revealed it would take up to three-and-a-half hours to charge an electric car at one of the 7kW posts set to be installed around Edinburgh.


.....Mr Curtis admitted: “Honestly, no, I don’t [think they will get used]. But we need to have a safety net to encourage people to buy the electric vehicles in the first place."

       And then by comparison, since both letters went out to all and sundry, here is the more deeply intellectual letter the papers
I normally aim at, claim to be interested in.

      The subject, the massive increase in shale gas reserves, should be the most important news item of at least the week, since it means we definitely have the potential for as much cheap energy as we want for centuries and can thus easily get out of recession.

      If Google News is to be believed, and it isn't entirely, this letter was unpublishable. It would be too long to fit the Metro house style but I doubt if anybody in the "serious" press doubts it is entirely true:

The British Geological Survey is understood to have increased dramatically its official estimate of the amount of shale gas to between 1,300 trillion and 1,700 trillion cubic feet, dwarfing its previous estimate of 5.3 trillion cubic feet.


This would heat every home in Britain for 1,500 years.

This is from government figures not yet published but perhaps they will be in due course with sufficient fanfare despite Ed Davy having previously counterfactually told Parliament the "leading companies" in the shale gas industry told him there was less than they had claimed back then and they needed more regulating.


Gas generation, like nuclear, currently costs about 30% of the average of the basket of power we use. In America shale gas has reduced gas prices to 1/4 of what they were. The arithmetic is obvious. We can end fuel poverty, and a recession caused by having some of the world's highest energy costs, any time our parasitic politicians are willing to allow it.