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Shetland Islands could expose SNP for the one-trick con artists they are says PAUL BALDWIN****

WELL no-one saw that one coming. Little Shetland, beautiful, windswept, glorious little Shetland, has just launched a political broadside against Nicola Sturgeon which could genuinely sound the death knell of the Scottish Nationalist Party.

Like all truly great political moves it is at once audacious, brilliant and bloody hilarious. Because the Shetland Islanders want nothing less than independence from Scotland – and they want a referendum to make it all legal and above board. The fledgling Democratic Republic of Shetland wants to beat Ms Sturgeon at her own indyref game. And if they are serious, and they seem to be, the move leaves the SNP woefully exposed as the one-trick con artists they always were.

Because how can a party entirely predicated on, indeed psychotically obsessed with, sticking it to the English with yet another independence referendum deny the same right to Shetland?

The SNP loves to play the bullied, wounded, underdog card but, at a stroke, if they deny the Shetland Islanders' right to self determination they become the big bad bully we always knew they were.

But there's worse for Ms Sturgeon. Much worse actually.

Because Shetland is right next to the bulk of the North Sea oil fields – and oil is the pot of liquid gold at the end of Scotland's rainbow, it props-up the entire Hibernian economy.

Brent Crude – the standard benchmark for pricing oil – comes from the Brent field. And the Brent field, and many more oil and gas platforms, are in an area of the North Sea known to the industry as West Shetland.

And suddenly that would all be the property of the DRS.

It would also instantly give the 23,000 souls on the islands of Shetland one of the highest GDP's in the world.

If I lived there you bet I'd be voting for independence.

Without this source of income the Ms Sturgeon's Scottish independence starts to unravel and look like a vote for third world status. A oil-free, desperately thin, Scottish economy would also almost certainly mean the end of Ms Sturgeon's dream of re-joining the EU. Why would Brussels take on another mouth to feed?

ut there's one final wonderful twist too. The Shetlanders are famously generally anti-SNP as, frankly, neither Ms Sturgeon nor her predecessor Alex Salmond have done much for them except siphon off the oil.

The islanders are suspicious of Ms Sturgeon's centralisation of power and her crazed bid to split from the UK. Prior to the independence referendum in 2014 the MPs and MSPs on the Shetland islands demanded that they should be given an opt-out option if the Scottish mainland voted to split from the UK.

So they don't really want independence per se – they want to remain part of Britain by becoming a Crown Dependency like Jersey.

Of course there'd a be more than a little discussion of who gets what from the oil but essentially Shetland, and the black gold in their waters, would remain British.

And don't forget, just in case you thought the Shetlands were just sheep and shortbread, the islands are likely to be at the forefront of Britain's future space industry.

One of the Shetland islands Unst is earmarked to become Britain's first spaceport and will see the UK's first commercial rocket launch next year.

Of course the whole thing could be a ruse to prise more from Holyrood – but if the Shetlanders are serious I think, in the interests of democracy, it is our beholden duty to stand foursquare behind them.

Viva the Republic!

ieuan 7 Oct 4
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Finding Oil has an immediate effect of turning everyone dependent on the money into a noodle head! Or inviting Noodle heads to rule them! Especially Countries. Go Shetlanders!

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