We're backing Scotland with billions in investment, says Reeves ahead of visit
Rachel Reeves said Labour is 'seizing the huge potential and opportunities that Scotland has to offer' in defence and energy.
She will visit RAF Lossiemouth in Moray and the St Fergus gas plant in Aberdeenshire on Friday, exactly a week after she toured the Rolls-Royce factory near Glasgow Airport.
The Chancellor will meet 200 Boeing staff at the military site where three new E-7 Wedgetail aircraft are being made.
The UK Government said its plans to increase defence spending to 2.6% will raise Britain's GDP by around 0.3%, while adding 26,100 jobs to the Scottish economy.
It also pointed to its £200 million investment for Aberdeenshire's Acorn carbon capture project, which could create 15,000 new jobs while safeguarding 18,000 more. A final investment decision for the project is yet to be made.
Ms Reeves said: 'We're seizing the huge potential and opportunities that Scotland has on offer.
'Whether it's in defence to keep the UK safe, or clean energy to power all corners of the country, this Government is backing Scotland with billions of pounds of investment to grow the economy and create jobs.'
Scottish Secretary Ian Murray said the Government is investing in defence to 'ensure Britain's security and deter our adversaries and drive economic growth'.
He added: 'This investment is a massive jobs opportunity for Scotland – this 'defence dividend' is good news for Scotland, where it will help create skilled jobs, drive economic growth, and help tackle the critical skills gaps facing the country in sectors such as nuclear, construction, maritime and project management.'
Maria Laine, Boeing's UK president, said: 'Boeing has a long-standing presence in Scotland including at RAF Lossiemouth, the home to the UK's P-8 Poseidon fleet and where the E-7 Wedgetail will be based when it enters service.
'As a key partner of the UK Armed Forces, Boeing welcomes the defence spending increase and has seen first-hand how defence infrastructure investments, such as the £100 million Atlantic Building and new E-7 facilities at RAF Lossiemouth, can deliver for local jobs, suppliers and UK national security.'
Michelle Ferguson, director of CBI Scotland, added: 'Scotland's energy and defence sectors are vital to our economy, driving investment and supporting thousands of skilled jobs.
'The Chancellor's announcement of £200 million for the Acorn energy project is very encouraging, but businesses are eager for final approval to unlock its full potential and secure North Sea jobs.
'Increased defence spending will further boost Scotland's skilled workforce and create growth opportunities across key supply-chain.
'Close collaboration between the Scottish and UK governments will be essential to fully realise these benefits, driving forward national security and Scotland's transition to a resilient, low-carbon economy.'
Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce urged the Chancellor to drop the energy profits levy (EPL), the so-called 'windfall tax' on oil and gas companies, which has a headline rate of 78%.
Chief executive Russell Borthwick said: 'If we stick to course on the accelerated decline of the North Sea, then we'll only have a few short years and not prosperous decades of future oil and gas from our own waters.
'Instead, we'll import more, pay more and suffer further consequences of jobs and businesses lost, just at the time we need them to support the energy transition.
'We know the Chancellor needs to find growth from somewhere within the UK economy. With oil and gas, there's no need to start from scratch or build out a nascent industry.
'Simply by removing the confiscatory EPL, letting investment flow into projects and stimulating activity in a sector which has been hammered by policy for too long, we can unlock significant growth in the UK economy.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
19 minutes ago
- BBC News
Car finance payouts limited, but lenders aren't off the hook
There may well be a few sighs of relief from senior finance company and banking executives following the Supreme Court's ruling, but it is unlikely you will hear the champagne corks verdict does almost certainly reduce the potential compensation bill significantly. Lenders no longer face the prospect of having to pay £30bn to £40bn to aggrieved car buyers. The likelihood of the government stepping in also appears to have receded the industry is not off the hook. The Financial Conduct Authority may still open a redress scheme for cases where dealers had a financial incentive from lenders to ramp up interest rates on loans as much as possible. The Supreme Court's ruling also upheld one consumer claim, in which the commission payments were deemed unfair – and that could provide a template for others to follow. All of this means the compensation bill could still be in the Supreme Court's intervention has been eagerly awaited since October, when the Appeal Court issued a verdict in three test cases which could have triggered an avalanche of compensation each case, people who had bought cars on finance claimed they were partially unaware that the deal had involved a commission payment being made by the lender to the car dealer. They claimed that in law the commissions amounted to bribes, or secret Appeal Court judges agreed, essentially saying that commission payments made by a finance company to a dealer for arranging a car loan were illegal if the car buyer had not given his or her "informed consent".They also concluded that a car dealer had a "fiduciary duty" towards the car buyer when it came to arranging a car loan. In other words, the dealer should set his or her own interests aside, and act purely on the customer's meant that millions of car buyers could potentially claim compensation – if they could show that the dealer had not specified what commission payments they were receiving for lining up a finance deal. It was not enough for the details to be buried in small had feared that this would lead to an avalanche of claims against them – and that the same arguments could be used to challenge other kinds of consumer finance agreements as well, potentially increasing the compensation bill still the Supreme Court threw very cold water over those arguments. The President of the Court, Lord Reed, dismissed the idea that car dealers had a "single minded duty of loyalty" to their customers, and insisted they "plainly and properly" had personal interests in the finance agreements they were involved ruling clearly blocks off what could have been a very wide avenue for compensation claims. However, the court did side with one of the claimants. In the case of Marcus Johnson, a factory worker, it decided that the finance agreement was "unfair" under the terms of the Consumer Credit Act. This was because the size of the commission payment was very large, and because Mr Johnson had been misled about the relationship between the dealer and the lender. He was, they said, entitled to say this could open the doors for other cases in which the commission payments are seen to be is also a key question the Supreme Court ruling does not answer. This is what should happen in cases involving so-called Discretionary Commission Agreements (DCAs). These were finance deals in which the car dealer could set the interest rate of a loan, within a set scale. The higher the rate, the more commission they would be paid – and the customer would be unaware of the Financial Conduct Authority banned such deals in 2021. It is now considering whether to launch a redress scheme for consumers who were affected by them. If it goes ahead, millions of car buyers could still have a claim, though it is not clear how much compensation they would to Richard Barnwell, a financial services advisory partner at accountancy firm BDO, the bill could still be substantial."We believe there is still a potential for redress, for example, if discretionary commission arrangements are deemed to be an unfair relationship, redress could still be from to £5bn to £13bn or more," he analysts agree. According to Martin Lewis, who runs the MoneySavingExpert website, "the Supreme Court has certainly narrowed the number of people who will be able to reclaim car finance. I think you're probably talking the lower end of £10bn, as opposed to £40bn."That £10bn would still be a significant figure. But the finance industry appears to have avoided the potential free-for-all rush to claim compensation the earlier verdict had threatened to spark while the Treasury says it will "work with regulators and industry to understand the impact for both firms and consumers", the BBC understands that the likelihood of the government intervening with retrospective legislation to protect financial firms has now diminished law of bribery only applies to persons who owe a single-minded duty of loyalty and are therefore bound to have no personal interest in the matter that they are dealing the present case the car dealers plainly and properly have a personal interest in the dealings between the customers and the finance companies.
The Sun
19 minutes ago
- The Sun
Who asked for population of Greater Manchester to flood UK in just 4 years? Politicians are so out of touch with public
WHAT holds a country together? It's one of the most important questions a nation can ask. Yet, today, were you to quiz anybody in Westminster, they would probably stare back at you with a blank expression, unable to give you a convincing answer. 11 This was not the case in the most ancient civilisations, such as Greece and Rome, of course, where this question was always on the minds of leaders. In Ancient Greece, the writer Pericles warned that leaders will only hold their state together so long as they listen to the people they lead, 'for only then can leaders rule with their trust'. And in Ancient Rome, too, the statesman Cicero reached the same conclusion, warning the leaders of the city state that unless they look after their own people first — which he considered their 'highest duty' — then their civilisation will rapidly crumble from within and become vulnerable to external invaders. Why, you are probably asking yourself, am I rewinding the clock to these ancient thinkers? Because what they understood is what far too many of our politicians in Westminster today fail to understand — that once this sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled breaks, there is no going back. Once leaders become so out of touch, so adrift from the people they claim to represent, then their civilisation will plunge into chaos, carnage and darkness. And is this not what is happening in Britain today? A political class, a ruling class, that increasingly looks utterly adrift from the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding majority? Take another issue some of those ancient philosophers alluded to: The influx of outsiders and foreigners through the deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration. Who voted for this? Only this week, shockingly, we learned that the population of England and Wales is growing at the fastest rate in history, with some 707,000 people added last year and some 2.5million since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Who voted for this? Seriously? Who voted for this population explosion, for a pace and scale of change that is now leaving many of our communities and our country unrecognisable? Who asked for their leaders to add the equivalent of the entire Greater Manchester area in only four years? And just look at how dramatic and historically unprecedented this is. Between the election of Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, and Tony Blair, in 1997, the annual rate of population increase in England and Wales never surpassed a peak of 188,000 people in a single year, and averaged roughly 111,000 people over each 12-month period. 11 But since Covid? Well, thanks to policies introduced by the hapless 'Uniparty', by politicians on both the Left and Right who are now openly ignoring what the people want, if not treating them with total contempt, these numbers have rocketed. Some 618,000 people were added to our population in the year to June 2022. Another 821,000 in the following 12 months. And now, in the year to June 2024, as we learned this week, another 707,000. What is the main reason for this? Well, it's definitely not what's called 'natural growth' among the native English and Welsh people — the kind of growth that ensures a country grows and evolves at a natural pace, where change is manageable. No. Far from it. Almost all of our population growth today is because of mass immigration, with 1.1million people migrating into England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2024, and 452,200 leaving. Think about that. Around 1.1million people in just one year — equivalent to adding a city the size of Liverpool, comprised entirely of migrants, in just 12 months. This is insane. Claims are nonsense And on top of that we can add another fact we discovered this week, which is that the number of small boat crossings this year alone has now surged above 25,000, up 51 per cent on the same point last year, and taking the total to more than 170,000 illegal migrants since 2018. The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. What would those ancient thinkers have made of this, too, I wonder? A nation-state that cannot even control its own borders, where mainly young men of fighting age from distant lands are flooding freely into our country on a daily basis? In Westminster, our completely hapless politicians will try to distract you and downplay all this by blabbering something like 'we have always had an asylum problem', or, even worse, 'we have always been a nation of immigrants'. Both of these claims are nonsense. If you want to get a sense of just how historic and unprecedented this population explosion really is then consider just one astonishing fact, shared this week by an expert on the topic, Dr Paul Morland. In every single year since Tony Blair came to power, since 1997, there has been more immigration into these islands than there was throughout the entire period between the Anglo-Saxon era in the 5th and 6th Centuries and World War Two. At least until the last quarter-century, in other words, this country was defined by what those ancient thinkers thought was essential to maintaining the unity and survival of a state — a stable population with manageable rates of change, and where, on the whole, the people did trust their leaders because those leaders did make an attempt to listen and respond to the people. But today all that is long gone. Today, in sharp contrast, we are living in a much more fragile and febrile civilisation where, as the likes of Pericles and Cicero warned, our leaders are no longer fulfilling their first duty of keeping their own people safe. Far from it. Our borders are completely and utterly out of control. We do not know who is coming in and who is going out of the country. Bound by shared history We have even discovered that our own leaders have been importing members of the Taliban, alongside thousands of other Afghans, while gagging the Press and refusing to tell their own people. And now, because of this policy of mass uncontrolled immigration — a policy that nobody in this country ever voted for — we have a sense of what is about to unfold. White Britons are now forecast to become a minority in this country by the year 2063, and much sooner for the under-40s. 11 11 The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. Unless something changes, and changes soon, then all these trends will only accelerate in the years ahead, completely transforming our communities and nation, and ushering in enough people to fill six cities the size of Birmingham in the next 12 years alone. The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said that a nation is held together by something deeper than a contract — it is bound by a shared history, a shared culture and the sense we belong to one another. Is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe. But how on Earth can we ever hope to hold a nation together that is experiencing this scale of population change? That is imposing policies and broken borders on a people who never voted for this, and never asked for it. And how, we might also ask, is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe? I do not know for certain what those ancient thinkers Pericles and Cicero would make of it were they to come back to life and assess the state of Britain today. I suspect that, like thousands of years ago, they'd warn we are living in a civilisation that looks set to crumble from within — a place where our leaders no longer appear all that interested in fulfilling their responsibility to the people and where mass immigration is blowing apart that once sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled. And for these reasons alone, they would probably conclude that unless we can somehow find our way to a radical change of direction then our civilisation, as we currently know it, will most likely not survive. 11 11 11
Daily Mail
19 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Donald Trump hits out at Federal Reserve as US jobs fall
Donald Trump launched a fresh attack on the chair of the Federal Reserve after the US jobs market suffered a sharp slowdown over the summer. The world's largest economy added just 73,000 jobs in July – fewer than the 110,000 expected – reviving hopes of a September interest rate cut. And figures for May and June were lowered by 258,000 in an unusually large revision by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In retaliation, Trump last night said he would sack BLS head Erika McEntarfer. It came as US stocks tumbled after Trump slapped tariffs on trading partners. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1 per cent yesterday afternoon, while the S&P 500 dropped 1.2 per cent. The tech-focused Nasdaq was down 1.7 per cent. European stocks were also rocked by Trump's trade war, with Germany's Dax losing 2.7 per cent and Paris's Cac index dropping 2.9 per cent. The UK got off lightly as the FTSE 100 fell 0.7 per cent, or 64.23 points, to 9068.58. Pharmaceutical firms were among the biggest fallers in London after Trump demanded lower prices. AstraZeneca fell 1.9 per cent and GSK dropped 1.5 per cent. The retreat came as revised figures showed the US economy added just 14,000 jobs in June, a figure revised from a previously reported 147,000. Payrolls for May were slashed by 125,000 to a gain of 19,000 jobs. The BLS described revisions as 'larger than normal'. Atakan Bakiskan, US economist at Berenberg, said: 'The July report provided ammunition for those expecting a Fed rate cut in September.' 'This data has led to a rapid recalibration of US interest rate expectations,' Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, said. On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump wrote: 'Too little, too late. Jerome 'Too Late' Powell is a disaster. DROP THE RATE! .. Tariffs are bringing billions of dollars into the USA!' The President has branded the central bank chair a 'stubborn moron', saying he 'must lower interest rates now'. 'If he continues to refuse, the board should assume control and do what everyone knows has to be done,' he added. Reports last month suggested Powell's future could be in doubt after Trump met congressional Republicans to discuss sacking him. But the President later insisted he would only fire the central bank boss if he were guilty of fraud.
