Oil slick

SO, DANNY Alexander claims that the revisions made by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) regarding oil revenues make the Scottish Government’s financial projections “incredible” (your report, 12 July).

By The Newsroom

Published 14th Jul 2014, 01:00 BST

What worries me most about this statement is that this man is Chief Secretary to the Treasury and either he is a consummate actor or he genuinely believes in the projections made by the OBR. He also makes a good fist of presenting the OBR as independent. That may be questionable, but what is not is its total inability to make and stick with consistent projections.

It suits the UK government to persevere with George Osborne’s creation, but who could trust an organisation which, in less than a year, has had to downgrade its own projections by £20.6 billion, or more than  25 per cent? An organisation whose estimates of existing oil resources are between 14 to 20 billion barrels less than genuinely independent sources in the oil and gas industry.

However, Mr Alexander is the man who believed the Treasury when it told him that start-up costs for an independent Scotland would amount to £2.7bn.

Douglas Turner

Derby Street

Edinburgh