It's Scotland's oil

It 's Scotland 's oil was a slogan of the Scottish National Party ( SNP) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He played on the North Sea oil, whose existence suspects since 1959 and was proved in 1970 in the British sector of the North Sea, and the British share is primarily east and north of the coast of Scotland.

Under this motto, the SNP was able to twelvefold their vote in the British general election within ten years and to win a third of the Scottish electorate and thus eleven seats in the House in the elections in the fall of 1974 with 839 628 votes, and thus the best choice result of SNP to achieve in their history.

Before the Phillips Petroleum Company in 1969 in the Norwegian and Royal Dutch Shell discovered oil in 1970 in the British North Sea sector, was one of the most serious arguments against Scottish independence that an independent Scotland would not be economically viable. The oil discoveries changed the picture dramatically, the SNP claimed that the oil off Scotland's coasts, an independent Scotland one of the richest countries in Europe would. They threw the British government intend to spend the revenue for white elephants (third London airport, Channel Tunnel, Concorde ) in southern England, as well as the crisis-hit British economy also the time there was suddenly in the dependence of Scotland. The British government stood in line with international law on the view that under the Convention states over the continental shelf, the rights to exploit the natural resources of the same only entire nations, it therefore is no sub-national units on the seabed, and no sub-national oil.

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

Although the oil reserves in the North Sea slowly draw to a close, in particular the publication of the government memo has again taken care of discussions. While Norway, thanks to its oil to one of the richest countries in the world and Alaska, whose stocks have been exploited in the 1970s, since then one of the richest states in the USA, Scotland is still economically weaker erected on average than the south of England. The SNP claimed in 2006 that Scotland would have lost in the years since the oil exploitation £ 200 billion in tax revenue.