It's Scotland's oil

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It's Scotland's oil was a Scottish National Party (SNP) slogan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He alluded to the North Sea oil , the existence of which has been suspected since 1959 and was proven in 1970 in the British area of ​​the North Sea, and whose British part is mainly east and north of the Scottish coast.

Under this motto, the SNP was able to increase its share of the vote in the British general election twelve-fold within ten years and in the elections in autumn 1974 with 839,628 votes, one-third of the Scottish electoral council and thus eleven seats in the lower house, the best so far To achieve the election result of the SNP in its history.

Before the Phillips Petroleum Company discovered oil in Norway in 1969 and Royal Dutch Shell in the British North Sea sector in 1970, one of the most serious arguments against Scottish independence was that an independent Scotland would not be economically viable. The oil discoveries changed the picture drastically, the SNP claimed that with the oil off Scotland's coasts, an independent Scotland would become one of the richest states in Europe. They accused the British government of spending the revenues on white elephants ( London's third airport , Channel Tunnel , Concorde ) in southern England, just as the crisis-ridden English economy of the time suddenly found itself dependent on Scotland. The British government turned out in line with international law on the view that according to the Convention on the Continental Shelf the rights to exploit the natural resources of the same only entire nations states, it therefore is no sub-national units on the seabed and no subnationales oil.

The exact limits of the "Scottish" and the "English" sector of the North Sea and thus the distribution of oil are still controversial today. Documents from the period published in late 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act show, however, that Harold Wilson's British government was plagued by both serious political and economic fears should Scottish oil claims gain strength. The British government feared that Scotland could develop an economy similar to Switzerland and that the danger of independence would be greater than ever.

Although the oil stocks in the North Sea are slowly coming to an end, the publication of the government memos in particular has caused discussions again. While Norway, thanks to its oil, has become one of the richest countries in the world and Alaska, whose reserves were also exploited in the 1970s, has been one of the richest states in the USA since then, Scotland is on average still economically weaker than the south of England. The SNP claimed in 2006 that Scotland had lost £ 200 billion in tax revenue in the years since oil exploitation.

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