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Our North British cousins were keen to pocket the enormous oil revenues to fund their endless spending spree... "The North Sea oil industry has cost taxpayers more than £300 million over the past financial year, becoming a drain on national finances for the first time on record, official figures show. Taxes paid by oil and gas companies fell in 2016-17 because of lower oil prices, continuing investment and cuts in tax rates, according to the figures from HM Revenue & Customs. Tax rebates issued to companies as relief on the costs of decommissioning and other expenditure outweighed the tax paid for the first time. As a result, UK government revenues from oil and gas production declined to minus £312 million in 2016-17, compared with £151 million in 2015-16, a report by HMRC shows. The decline in North Sea tax revenues has been politically explosive, since the industry was at the heart of the Scottish National Party’s economic case for independence in the 2014 referendum."

I appreciate that this is a contentious topic, but the following column was printed in today's Times. I think the article raised a valid point, but that's not the point of posting it. My difficulty is that even mentioning the overreaction highlighted in the article would no doubt provoke outrage: it's a bit like a super-injunction - the first rule is not to even talk about it. See what you think... "We can’t discuss or depict Islam without causing mortal offence. Surely 1.8 billion Muslims can’t all be victims The young man with the beard and the fresh face has made his own YouTube film and for nine minutes delivers a confident and unbroken speech to camera. He uses the tagline TheAlHaque and is, I’d guess, British-born to a Pakistani family. He is talking animatedly about something he’s watched. “It was such a mockery he made of our religion,” he says. “It was very, very disturbing and very hurtful to 1.8 billion people. This programme should not have aired.” I suppose that TheAlHaque might have been part of a phenomenon that a fellow columnist introduced to me and others this week. A Muslim himself, he criticised the appearance of Tony Blair on BBC Radio, where the former Prime Minister was talking about the sometimes violent reactions to that anti-Islamic video shot in someone’s California backyard and uploaded on to the internet. Mr Blair is, wrote this man, “one of the biggest provokers of global Muslim anger”. My mind couldn’t get beyond that phrase. I was stuck on it like someone with baggy trousers climbing over a barbed wire fence. “Global Muslim anger.” The anger of Muslims all over the globe. There are up to two billion Muslims on the planet and most countries have some Muslims in them. What do they all have to be angry about? The rich Muslims, the poor Muslims, the devout and the dilatory, the African and Saudi Muslims, the Chechens and Turks, the Iranians and Filipinos, the majority Malaysians and the minority Burmese Rohingyas? And what “global anger” could they lay claim to that couldn’t be equally invoked by Buddhists, Hindus and Christians (I’d say Jews, but there aren’t really enough of them to be global any more), let alone women or the disabled or black people? I asked and the only answer was the counter-question, did I really believe that Muslims had nothing to be aggrieved about? Some do, like the Rohingyas. But globally, qua Muslim? The film that TheAlHaque was objecting to in the name of the angry 1.8 billion was not, as you may have expected, The Innocence of Muslims, the dreck unter-twaddle lens-pullings of a West Coast fraudster in whose repudiation several have been killed in various places all over the world. No, it was the historian Tom Holland’s Channel 4 look at some mysteries surrounding the earliest days of Islam. Holland’s thesis — fleshed out in a recent lengthy and careful book — suggested that the growing Arab Empire of the 7th century might have given rise to Islam the religion, and not the other way around. I hardly need to say that similar speculation about the origins of other religions, including Christianity, are almost as old as TV. TheAlHaque’s problem was that, in his view, Islam was unsusceptible to such an approach. “This historian needs to understand one simple thing,” he said. “The base to our religion is not history. Our base is revelation from God.” OK. All right. Fine. No worries. That’s your view. This is mine. Except TheAlHaque also says this: “He [Holland] has gone around and he’s speaking to some Jews on that programme. It was such a mockery of the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. You can’t just go around making a mockery of someone’s belief.” Questioning becomes ”mockery”. “Mockery” should not be allowed. A fortnight ago Channel 4 cancelled a special screening of Holland’s programmes after threats of violence. Today police stand outside the office of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo because it has once again published cartoons depicting Muhammad. On the website of Press TV, the Iranian station, a Dr Ismail Salami (“an internationally published author of several books and hundreds of articles, Shakespearean, Iranologist and lexicographer”) connects the backyard movie with Holland’s film as part of a “co-ordinated effort” linked to the “Zionist Jews” who — in his imagination — fund the Islamophobic English Defence League. The week that Salman Rushdie’s memoir of the events leading up to the threats on his life and his years “on the run” is published seems a good time to ask whether we can really carry on like this. According to many, we cannot discuss Islam, depict it or write about it except in certain very circumscribed ways without causing mortal offence. This is despite the fact that it plays a far bigger role in our lives in countries such as Britain than it did 30 years ago. And worse, in a world where the mobility of communication outstrips the mobility of understanding, we are now at hazard of “global Muslim anger” every time a bongo-brain in a Moosejaw shed uploads an idiocy involving something Islamic. Of course, there are elaborate explanations for this situation that seek to place the blame for what seems to be impossible behaviour by some Muslims on to just about anyone else. One that I thought was worth bringing to readers’ attention is from the Islam convert and scholar Myriam Francois- Cerrah. It was published by The Huffington Post and others last week. What Ms Francois-Cerrah argues is that the bonkers film “was the straw that broke the camel’s back”. So not the film after all. Not the cartoons. Not The Satanic Verses. “Broken by poverty,” she writes, “threatened by drones, caught in the war between al-Qaeda and the US, to many Arab Muslims the film represents an attack on the last shelter of dignity — sacred beliefs — when all else has been desecrated ... When your country has been bombed, you’ve lost friends and family, possibly your livelihood and home, dignity is pretty much all you have left ... These protests aren’t about a film — they’re about the totality of ways in which Muslims have felt humiliated over decades.” Who bombed the Sydney Muslims who fought the Aussie police last week? What drones threatened the Tunisian Islamists who attacked a school? What American deprived a Libyan militiaman of dignity? How did poverty force the Qataris to protest against a video? Why don’t Cambodian Buddhists burn Korans in retaliation for the blasting of the Bamiyan Buddhas? Why has no Muslim leader in my experience ever, ever, ever mentioned how the British and Americans saved Muslims in Kosovo from genocide? Of course Muslims are not the only people whose leaders harness and exploit the reactionary emotional power of grievance. But the idea of “global Muslim anger” relies on the seductive trick of placing yourself always in the position of the done-to and not the doing, even when you run a quarter of the countries on the planet. It’s not global anger. It’s global adolescence."