Frontrunner to take Blackford’s place is ‘Mr Misinformation’

THE frontrunner to replace Ian Blackford as the SNP’s leader at Westminster has been accused of spreading misinformation about wind energy.

Nationalists have been criticised for repeatedly claiming that Scotland has 25 per cent of Europe’s wind power capacity, a figure the Scottish Government recently admitted is wrong.

SNP members including Mr Blackford have used the claim to make the argument for Scottish independence.

The party’s energy spokesman Stephen Flynn has also regularly repeated the claim and is now facing calls to apologise. Unionist think tank These Islands produced research exposing the inaccurate statistic about Scottish wind energy potential.

Chief executive Sam Taylor has now shared a ‘supercut’ of numerous occasions Mr Flynn regurgitated the figure at the House of Commons and in the media. Mr Taylor said: ‘Stephen Flynn has misled the House of Commons more often than any other MP on Scotland’s share of Europe’s offshore wind potential.

‘It is telling that his SNP colleagues have decided a talent and enthusiasm for delivering fake statistics is exactly what they are looking for in a new Westminster leader.’

The campaign group’s chairman, Kevin Hague, added that it was ‘worth watching his relentless repetition of a blatant falsehood’.

The Scottish Government has admitted the 25 per cent figure was wrong and needed updating, having been calculated by combining statistics from two old reports.

One of these used a definition of Europe that included only 11 countries and was based on information dating from 1993. However, a Freedom of Information request by These Islands disclosed that civil servants had concerns about its accuracy more than two years ago – with officials stating in October 2020 that it had ‘proved very difficult to source’.

Scottish Government correspondence showed an official warned that the 25 per cent estimate has ‘never been properly sourced’.

In January last year another civil servant warned that ‘we did recycle those figures quite robotically without really checking them’.

Scottish Conservative energy spokesman Liam Kerr said: ‘It’s clear that the man in pole position to become the new SNP Westminster leader is among the most prolific peddlers of this fake fact.

‘Stephen Flynn should have known better than to repeat this misleading and dodgy data over and over again.

‘If he is elected, Mr Flynn should begin with an apology to the public for constantly using this false statistic.’

Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine added: ‘The SNP are replacing one peddler of dodgy statistics with another.’