The Great Deception says:
When the Scottish Parliament was established, the UK Government annexed 6000 square miles of Scottish Waters rich in Oil, Gas and Fish and transferred them to English jurisdiction.In these cases, I have re-allocated this areas Tax revenues to the Scottish Tax Revenues account under the original international boundary.
What
original international boundary, one might ask? There can't have been an international boundary, in the accepted sense of the phrase, since before the 1707 Act of Union. The much-misquoted
Continental Shelf (Jurisdiction) Order 1968 (
link) only defined a
Scottish area for purposes of application of Scots Law at sea. It certainly did not establish an international boundary.
The SNP's Mike Weir, MP for Angus has said:
The fishing boundary between Scotland and England has been recognised for hundreds of years. This move showed up Labour's contempt for our fishing industry.
This is entirely incorrect, as explained by Fisheries Minister Lord Sewel in a 1999 letter (
link):
Much has been made about 6000 square miles of fishing grounds being seized. But the reality of the situation is that 140,000 square miles of British Fishery Limits has been transferred from the UK Government to the Scottish Parliament. We must not lose sight of this.
The boundary has been set by drawing a median line. This follows the accepted convention on such matters. Any point on the boundary line is of equal distance to the mainland of Scotland and of England. In other words every inch of the 6000 square miles is closer to England than to Scotland.
There has been no transfer of "Scottish fishing waters" to England. In fact, this Order allows the transfer of responsibility for regulating sea fisheries from the UK Parliament to the Scottish Parliament - not in the other direction. The rights of Scottish fishermen to fish throughout British fishery limits are unaffected by the Order.
The following is from Ross Finnie, Minister of Environment and Rural Development speaking in the Scottish Parliament on 3rd June 1999 (
link):
The most important point is that it is also wrong to claim that a legally enforceable boundary line has been shifted. This is the first time that a fisheries boundary has been fixed in law. Before devolution, there were no Scottish fishing waters. There were only British fishing limits. The so-called existing line is simply part of an administrative arrangement within a UK-wide management regime. The boundary lines in the order are being drawn in accordance with international convention on such matters and-as members who have studied this matter will be aware-have involved the use of median lines.
The method of using median lines is indeed the established
UN convention; see Part 2, Article 15. So, the upshot of this is that while
The Great Deception uses 95% as the percentage of UK oil production that would be allocated to an independent Scotland, that figure is based on wishful thinking about where the international maritime boundary would in fact lie. A truer proportion would therefore be about 90%.
The monetary significance of this error would be in the amount of 5% of £4.985 billion, which is approximately £250 million per annum.
