By Richie Venton, SSP Trade Union Organiser
A new study by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies think tank (CLES) has confirmed everything the SSP has argued for over a quarter of a century.
Commissioned by the Just Transition Partnership, the central conclusion the report reaches – in the words of CLES senior researcher, Fiona Henderson – is that “the question of ownership is central to the delivery of a just transition.”
Updated figures demonstrate that the arguments of the SSP for public ownership of energy, public transport (and beyond that, the construction industry and banking) are irrefutable.
A study of 105 onshore wind farms – which account for about half of Scotland’s total capacity in that sector – highlights that these privately-owned enterprises generated post-tax profits of £2.83 billion over 5 years.
But it’s not the Scottish people, workers, or families who reaped the rewards, in terms of reduced heating bills or investment in local communities, including those hosting the wind farms. No, nearly 90% of the £2.83 billion profits was handed out in dividends to shareholders.
SNP and Scottish Greens privatised the wind!
Alongside that, the CLES report vindicates the criticism we made, in 2022, when the SNP/Scottish Green Party coalition government handed out offshore wind farm licences to a clutch of multinational fossil fuel capitalists – at bargain basement prices.
At the time, we slammed the fact the ScotWind licences were sold for buttons and the big daddies of fossil fuel polluters – Shell and BP – got over 20% of these licences to make money.
We warned this would not lead to a bonanza of job creation in Scotland, or of investment in community improvements, because the bottom line for such capitalist profiteers is, well… profit!
No jobs bonanza from wind power
The CLES study of 20 ScotWind projects shows that whilst the private companies developing these sites have committed £95.67 billion in supply chain spending, less than £29 billion of that is committed to Scotland. Profits are being siphoned off to the bank accounts of offshore multinationals and job creation is likewise being offshored. And it’s getting worse. When launched four years ago, 38% of the supply chain spending was committed to Scotland, but that has fallen to 30%, a £7.4 billion reduction for the year.
We argued at the time of the ScotWind “fire sale of wind power” that public ownership would have produced an annual bounty of at least £5.5 billion to the public purse, but instead the SNP and Scottish Greens had sold off Scotland’s wind to profiteering capitalist exploiters.
Public ownership of energy
The SSP’s persistent case for democratic public ownership of energy production and distribution is echoed in the CLES report, which points up how public ownership could fund heat networks and home improvements, including insulation – which we have long argued should be provided free of charge to every home, hiring thousands of workers to systematically insulate, draft-proof, and instal green heating systems and fast broadband – combating both poverty and climate-wrecking emissions.
But the question of ownership is central…
Public transport – not profiteering
The CLES study repeats much of what the SSP has argued in our case for publicly-owned, free public transport. Including most recently, in my video in response to John Swinney’s talk of “public control” of the buses; the rank hypocrisy in the vitriolic response by the billionaire Easdale brothers, who own McGill’s buses; and our case for public ownership of buses (and all forms of transport) as the only guaranteed route to genuine public control and planning for public benefit.
In 2024/5, privatised bus companies got half a billion pounds – £499m to be precise – in subsidies from the Scottish Government, £392 million of which was to compensate the private profiteers for concessionary travel. That means 56% of last year’s total revenue for McGill’s, Stagecoach, Firstbus and their ilk, came directly from the public purse – state subsidised profiteering.
State subsidised profiteering
Half of all bus journeys that year were made by the 2.4 million people who have a concessionary travel card; proof, surely, that if free travel was extended to the entire population, the numbers using public transport would greatly increase.
At least that would be the case provided the transport network was vastly expanded and made reliable, by creating thousands of jobs to make staffing levels adequate – as opposed to the current profit-driven system, where drivers’ jobs are cut to the bone, meaning if a worker falls sick, buses are frequently cancelled, which discourages travel on them.
Free public transport
The public funds splashed out in subsidising the profits of billionaires like the Easdales, who also own Inverclyde Taxi Company and therefore have no vested interest in boosting bus services in the area, could and should instead go towards the provision of free travel for everyone in Scotland on an expanded, integrated, reliable, green-powered Public Transport Service.
Likewise, if the handful of capitalist multinationals which build and then lease the trains to ScotRail were taken into public ownership, a fortune could be saved by the removal of profiteering, thereby helping fund a free public transport service that would slash car pollution and the diseases it creates; put money in the pockets of people drowning in the cost of living crisis; and reduce the cruel social isolation too many people suffer, stunting the lives they could otherwise lead.
But the question of ownership is central…
This CLES study is renewed ammunition for arguing the SSP’s policies, as the only Party in Scotland which for the past 28 years has consistently fought for democratic public ownership of energy, transport, and other vital sources of wealth production and service provision – to cater for people, not profit, as we battle for an independent socialist Scotland.
Links to Further Resources
Watch this recent video on public ownership and free public transport:
Buy a copy of Socialist Change, ‘Not Climate Change – Poverty Pollution and Working Class Solutions’:
