John Swinney is not often asked to pronounce on national security, and on this evidence that may be no bad thing.
The SNP leader is pressing the Prime Minister to overturn the block on a proposed wind turbine development at Ardersier, close to Inverness.
The £1.5billion project was expected to support around 1,500 jobs, but was rejected earlier this year on national security grounds because it was being led by Ming Yang, the major Chinese energy company.
For UK ministers, the security concerns were simply too significant to ignore.
At the time, Swinney described the decision as “an anti-Scottish move” and cited Chinese involvement in the energy industry elsewhere in the UK, as if such judgments should be shaped by constitutional grievance rather than hard security assessments. He is now lobbying Andy Burnham to approve the scheme.
That stance has prompted sharp criticism from specialists who have spent far longer studying the risks than Swinney appears to have done.
Ian Williams, a long-standing China analyst and author of Vampire State, warned: “The risk is incredibly profound and to open the doors to this sort of technology, to effectively hand over a decarbonised grid to the control of the Chinese Communist Party is staggering and it is enormously naive to dismiss these national security issues.”
Ming Yang was removed from a German offshore wind project last year after cyber security worries and concerns that Beijing could exploit partial influence over wind power generation to apply pressure on Berlin when it chose.
Ming Yang is a private company, and there is no suggestion it has behaved improperly in the UK or elsewhere, but when it comes to national security the expectations are heightened.
John Swinney has urged Prime Minister Andy Burnham to rethink Ming Yang’s Highland facility
Ming Yang’s proposed £1.5billion plant would have been at Ardersier near Nairn
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been urged to reconsider the Chinese firm’s wind turbine factory plans, which was blocked by the UK Government on national security grounds
The Chinese government’s military-civil fusion strategy has dissolved many of the barriers between the state and private enterprise.
Ming Yang might want to do nothing more than build turbines and earn a profit for it, but the Chinese state cannot be relied upon not to interfere or coerce private firms.
The Beijing regime plays on this uncertainty and routinely accuses those who urge caution in these matters of ‘discrimination’, well aware how hypersensitive Western liberals are to accusations of prejudice or racism.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it does: China does not have our best interests at heart, be that the UK or the West in general. Its leaders regard liberal democracy with disdain and regard limited government and civil liberties as the foolish indulgences of decadent and doomed cultures. Beijing’s view of its interests is expansive and it will do whatever it deems necessary to advance those interests.
In March 2024, the UK government identified ‘a clear pattern of malicious cyber activity by Chinese state-affiliated organisations and individuals targeting democratic institutions and parliamentarians in the UK and beyond’.
This included an assessment by the National Cyber Security Centre that it was ‘highly likely’ that the Electoral Commission’s systems were ‘compromised by a Chinese state-affiliated entity’ during 2021 and 2022.
This time last year, intelligence agencies from 13 nations, including the UK, issued an advisory over ‘malicious cyber activities’ by three Chinese tech companies against ‘critical sectors’ including government, transport and telecoms, with the data stolen giving Beijing’s spy networks ‘the capability to identify and track targets’ communications and movements worldwide’.
Whatever else might be said about Keir Starmer, his decision to bar Ming Yang in March was reasonable and proportionate.
There is no need for Andy Burnham to reconsider such a recent decision – the Chinese Communist Party hasn’t had a change of heart in the past five months.
The SNP has spent the better part of the last decade refusing to put North Sea energy jobs ahead of Net Zero and now it wants to lecture Westminster for putting national security ahead of Highland energy jobs.
Do they honestly think Downing Street wants to stand in the way of investment and employment?
The easiest course would have been to greenlight the project and share the credit for bringing opportunities to northern Scotland.
Blocking Ming Yang costs the government politically, not least because it can be exploited by charlatans for cheap partisan advantage.
This episode is an insight into the upper echelons of the Swinney-led SNP and what it reveals is nothing good.
These are supposed to be Nationalists, yet they openly disregard their nation’s security interests in the hopes of wooing Chinese investment, and all the baggage that comes with it.
Is this how Swinney would lead the independent Scotland he wants?
Would he brush off warnings from Scottish intelligence agencies and imperil national security and sovereignty just so he can get himself on the evening news and boast about creating jobs?
How quickly Honest John has been replaced by Sell-out Swinney.
Careers and investment are to be welcomed, and no one believes these come without trade-offs, but when the strings attached carry even a faint resemblance to a noose, government would be remiss not to err on the side of caution.
Don Quixote looked upon windmills and saw ‘monstrous giants’; Swinney looks upon a potential security risk and sees only windmills.
The First Minister’s politicking also reeks of hypocrisy. He has given his echo to the tawdry, filthy lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and has removed financial support for Scottish defence firms that sell to the Jewish state.
Yet he is more than happy, eager in fact, to do business with China, a country which can much more plausibly be accused of genocide against the Uyghurs.
For more than a decade now, China has rounded up a reported one million people from this mostly Muslim Turkic minority and transported them to concentration camps. This is equivalent to one in every ten Uyghurs in China.
The International Bar Association reports ‘extensively documented’ allegations that ‘women at such camps are subjected to pregnancy checks, forced implantation of intrauterine devices, forced sterilisation and forced abortions’, all telltale signs of a planned and concerted effort to erase a population by reducing its birthrates.
The IBA has also highlighted the testimony of whistleblower Sayragul Sauytbay, who describes ‘gang rapes committed against female prisoners’.
An independent tribunal chaired by barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice concluded in 2021 that Beijing’s policy towards the Uyghurs constituted genocide. The Chinese government, for its part, insists its facilities are ‘re-education camps’.
Why is Swinney so hellbent on doing business with China if he claims to care so much about human rights and international law? Why is it boycotts for Jerusalem and red carpets for Beijing?
When the First Minister bashes Westminster for blocking China’s latest encroachment, he doesn’t sound like he’s standing up for Scotland, he sounds like he’s sucking up to Beijing.
The question isn’t why the UK Government fears allowing China too much of an infrastructural foothold, but why the Scottish Government doesn’t.
