Small firms making big claims for Scottish independence

According to research by Mr Hague and The Sunday Telegraph, almost half of BfS’s identified members or supporters on its website have no limited company directorships at all. “They are basically people who have – or have had – jobs,” he said. Almost all the rest are directors of businesses officially defined as “small companies”.

Only seven identified BfS members appear to be active directors of significant companies employing more than a small number of people in Scotland. None appear to have significant cross-border trade. A further two signatories of last week’s letter, the engineering group Clyde Blowers and the bus and rail operator Stagecoach, do have a significant presence outside Scotland but are not identified as members of BfS.

Even more interestingly, a number of the leading BfS members – like the Yes effort generally – appear to have done quite well out of the Scottish public purse. BfS has seven directors, of whom four have substantial businesses. Three of the four – an unusually high proportion – have recently received substantial public support or subsidy for their businesses from the Scottish taxpayer.

Tony Adams, sole director of the largest BfS member business, Balhousie Care, a care home chain, is a beneficiary of the SNP government’s introduction of free personal care for the elderly. Public funding for this and other care services supported two-thirds of Balhousie’s clients in 2011, according to the company, a proportion that is likely to have grown since.

Ian McDougall is the director of the Glasgow Distillery Company, which was awarded £130,000 in regional selective assistance earlier this year by Scottish Enterprise. He also runs another business that helps others to get public grants.

Perhaps most interesting is Ivan McKee, whose company, Greenfold Systems, has twice hosted the First Minister, Alex Salmond, for SNP or pro-independence business events. Mr McKee has been a prominent spokesman for BfS – using Greenfold, a contract manufacturer and fabricator, as an example of how Scottish independence can work for business.

In December 2012, a few months after BfS was created, Greenfold was awarded £400,000 in regional selective assistance by Scottish Enterprise. The grant was given to create 65 new jobs at Greenfold’s Dunfermline factory, where it then employed 84 people, according to media reports.

However, almost two years on, few of these new jobs have been created. According to a feature on the company in the June 2014 edition of Fife Business Matters magazine, Greenfold still employs only 90 people. The latest accounts, for the year to September 30 2013, say that it is a “small company” with tangible net assets of only £135,000. Greenfold is registered in England and several contracts mentioned on Greenfold’s website appear to have been at least partly fulfilled by its sister companies in England.

The criteria for regional selective assistance state that any projects funded by it “must involve an element of capital investment” and be “mainly funded from the private sector”. Greenfold’s accounts for the period since the grant was awarded do not appear to show any significant capital investment or private funding on the company’s part.

Mr McKee was unavailable for comment, and the phone at Greenfold was not answered on Friday. However, another director of the company, Bob Waterson, said last night that the grant was based on the 65 jobs being created by 2015, which the company had now asked to be extended by a year. Only £35,000 of the grant had been drawn down so far, he said, which was more than matched by Greenfold’s own spend on capital expenditure.

“As of today, Greenfold has five or six outstanding opportunities to generate permanent growth in a number of sectors,” he said. “I would hope anyone in business would agree that what we’re trying to do in generating jobs is a positive thing, irrespective of politics. Our investors are looking at ways we can grow the business, which include private funding.”

Some of Business for Scotland’s arguments also seem as weak as their claim to have representative membership. A “debt counter” on their website claims that Scots “subsidise the UK” by being forced to pay interest on debts “none of which Scotland ran up”. In fact, of course, the debts were incurred by the UK, including Scotland, as a whole – many of them to bail out a pair of Scottish banks.

Business for Scotland may not be as much of a false front as some other allies of the Yes campaign – such as “Labour for Independence”, a supposed campaign by pro-Yes members of the Labour Party, which ran into trouble early on when it issued a photograph of five of its “Labour Party” supporters. Four of them, it turned out, were in fact SNP activists, including an SNP council leader.

But it is clearly not representative of Scottish businesspeople, the majority of whom will be voting No. Whether or not they are comfortable saying so is another matter, amid persistent reports – denied by the Scottish Government – that businesses have been threatened with losing contracts if they speak out. As with the abuse of civil service resources, described by The Telegraph last week, it is another example of how the Scottish official machine may be being bent to support independence.

“That’s why I got involved in the debate in the first place, I was so outraged that people were believing business supported the Yes campaign,” says Mr Hague, whose own business employs 200 people in West Lothian and does the vast majority of its trade across the border.

“The success with which the SNP managed to silence the CBI in this debate is stunning. They’ve silenced the voice of business and created their own artificial voice of business.”

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