North Sea spoils

Scotland has not benefited from oil as much as it should. Now the SNP wants a fresh look at the way revenues are split

“It’s Scotland’s oil” according to the SNP, and of course it is. There is no reasonable authority denying that, if Scotland were an independent nation, North Sea oil would be under Scottish jurisdiction, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Of course, Scotland isn’t independent and in theory Scotland benefits from the collective economic endeavour of UK plc through the Barnett Formula. But it remains the case that Scotland, even within the UK, is a nation with its own legal system and jurisdiction. It is perfectly legitimate for Alex Salmond to claim that Scotland is the only oil-producing nation in the world not to have benefited directly from oil wealth.


And they don’t have to be independent states. In 1976, the Canadian province of Alberta established the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund to set aside a proportion of government revenues from oil royalties. The same year the US state of Alaska set up the Alaska Permanent Fund which pays an annual cash dividend to every person who has been resident in the state for over a year.

The mother of all oil funds is of course the Norwegian state savings vehicle, renamed the Government Pension Fund of Norway in 2006. It is now worth some