Only in the fantasy world of the SNP and its perverse mission of job-destruction does the Scottish Government approach to BiFab make any sense. Having made promises costing us - the Scottish people - £50 million, the useless SNP is now trying to hide behind utter rubbish about EU state aid rules preventing it from honouring the solemn promises it made to BiFab and its workers. There is a simple truth here: either SNP ministers were grossly incompetent when they made these grandiose promises, or they were being cynically and deliberately economical with the truth - or both.
Either way, as entrepreneur Luke Johnson noted in the Sunday Times on 1st November 2020, "Only an absolute fool would now choose to invest in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales. All three are on their way to becoming banana republics." This astute observation is not a slur on the hard-working people of these parts of the UK, but a justified criticism of the appalling state of governance being exercised over devolved powers, especially in Scotland.
Here, we have a First Minister who has repeatedly misled parliament and presided over one disastrous investment decision after another. We have a Justice Secretary pushing a Hate Crime Bill that would severely undermine freedom of speech and see private conversations at home potentially criminalised in a way only totalitarian regimes operate. We have an Education Secretary who has apparently withdrawn Scotland from cooperating with international comparisons because those comparisons have shown just how badly the SNP has handled education in Scotland. And we have a Health Secretary who has no clue what is actually happening in Scotland's NHS, and presided over the care homes COVID scandal and the utter shambles of testing in Scotland.
When, as in Scotland today, you have an SNP "government" that has no respect for the truth, no respect for property rights, absolutely no idea how to run an economy, and a separatist agenda that would absolutely devastate the Scottish economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, you end up with a nation that - when viewed objectively by any potential investor - is barely a 'going concern' today, and would be bankrupted under separatist plans.
Most UK and overseas investors want to know that, when they put their money in to a project or a nation, the risk to their capital is reasonable, and that some real return on investment is likely. When you look at Scotland today, the governing party in Holyrood cannot even tell you what the national currency will be in five years time if they achieve their only real policy aim, separation. The SNP claims that Scotland could join the EU (despite repeated EU and various nation's dismissal of this possibility) but cannot say with what currency, or how it would manage to get to the required Convergence Criteria with an already huge current account fiscal deficit (heading well north of 10% and now quite likely to double given the SNP's job-destroying approach to COVID). Neither can the SNP explain how it would support the vast public sector in Scotland in the face of a shrinking private sector - and we must remember that it is private enterprise that generates the majority of the taxes that sustain the spending of the state in normal times.
Arguably the biggest risk for any serious investor in a private enterprise in Scotland today is that the SNP will seek - under separation - to misappropriate any successful business to suborn any capital or profit to state coffers, although Socialists like to call it nationalisation to dress up state theft in "progressive" terms. For those in doubt about what the left means by "progressive", it really is quite straightforward: it is the progressive take over by the Socialist state of every aspect of life, whether your job, your home, your children, your money, your human rights, your right to vote, or your right to freedom of speech.
Sadly for the workers and families that depend upon BiFab for their jobs and livelihoods, they have been forced into the unwelcome role of "canary in the coalmine". The beneficiaries of serial SNP incompetence and stupidity, not to mention what looks like a good deal of SNP dishonesty, BiFab offers a frightening window onto the future of the Scottish economy under SNP mismanagement, and well before the devastating disruption that separation would cause. Even if a post-COVID recovery does happen in Scotland, by no means a certainty given the severe structural damage being caused to key industries like Hospitality by SNP failures, the SNP's campaign of job-destruction is already under way. For the workers at BiFab the best hope is that the Union steps in, using the power of the UK Government to raise funds and support vital industries and jobs in a way that the SNP has promised to do but failed to deliver upon.
