A letter to the Editor of the Professional Engineer which was published in the September 2014 issue.
I was extremely surprised by the unbalanced report of the forthcoming referendum on separating Scotland from the UK which you featured in the August issue of the “Professional Engineer” (Ben Hargreaves reports).
When the PE went to press the polls were not “finely balanced” as the report states. The average of the last month gives 38% in favour and 52% opposed to a change in Scotland’s position in the UK with 10% undecided. Experience of past referendums shows that the “undecided” mostly either don’t vote or vote to oppose change, widening the gap in favour of the status quo still further.
However the opening page of your report featuring the nationalist leaders smiling and holding up their manifesto, through the page of quotations and graphics from Scottish government publications (signed off by the nationalists), to the prominent Saltire and accompanying quote likening the breakup of our country to “a management buyout “, would leave the casual reader to believe that the referendum had already been decided in the separatists favour.
It is tendentious, to say the least, to quote the nationalists’ favourite figure of 24 billion barrels of extractable oil and gas remaining on the UK continental shelf as if it were a proven fact. The total oil and gas extracted over more than 40 years is only around 42 billion barrels or 6 billion tonnes of oil equivalent.
The reduction in output from the peak year 1999 — 244 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoes) — has averaged 7.5% per annum, to around 72 mtoes in 2013. Taken to exhaustion at this rate of decline would yield 6.4 billion barrels remaining, not 12-24 billion as quoted elsewhere in the article.
In his quotes of manufacturers’ opinion, the article is similarly selective. Jim McColl of Clyde Blowers, best described as a private equity company, with manufacturing investments in and outside Scotland, favours separation. McColl gets pretty much equal billing with Andrew Cochrane, CEO of Weir Pumps, an internationally famous FTSE 100 company with 14,000 employees which actually manufactures things in Scotland. Cochrane opposes separation.
Finally to really underline his views about the breakup of the United Kingdom, my country and home of the I.MechE as it happens, Hargreaves signs off the article with a quote which the separatists could hardly improve on: “independence is inevitable — it’s just a matter of time”.