You were brought up in Edinburgh – can you say a little about your background?

My father came to Scotland during the Second World War and became the chief of Leith Docks, so I spent a lot of time there in my youth. I saw the steady decline in shipping and marine, post-empire, and lack of investment in finding a future role for industrial Scotland. I saw the infighting amongst small ports on the East Coast of Scotland while the big world of containerisation in Oakland, Houston, Hamburg and Singapore powered ahead in a new era. It was sad to see regional and local parochialism which has left a strong mark on my thinking. It was also sad to witness later the largely failed experiment with Silicon Glen, having witnessed the full power of Silicon Valley.

You are a self-described oil and gas man, yet the book describes a post-oil world.

It’s true that I have promoted the use of carbon in the economy for the last 45 years having worked in the oil, gas, aerospace and defence industries. I make no apology since I believe that the rapid development of fossil fuels has lifted over a billion people in the world out of poverty. The world will not run out of oil and gas in the next 100 years. However, the 10 billion people who are projected to live in this world by 2070 must find major alternatives rapidly – solar, wind, wave and tidal – that are much more sustainable. Scotland can use the last 50 years of its higher-cost oil to make this transition successfully. It is sad to see Scotland overdependent on oil and financial services during the 1970 to 2020 period. There was no sovereign fund and the only hope of Scotland creating an indigenous oil company based in Glasgow was squashed in the Thatcher free-market era.

How has your experience as a lobbyist informed your vision and writing?

Before taking on the role as a champion for the Aerospace and Defence Industry, I had little experience of Westminster or the press and how it worked in practice. I had to be a fast learner, realising five things about the role.

Number one: typically, a small number of people (around 50 say) had very large influence on any issue in the UK – a mix of politicians, journalists and media people, society influencers and civil servants. ‘Boiling the ocean’ is therefore not the best way to approach it. Finding and influencing the 50 opinion-formers can be more effective.

Number two: the media, despite their claim to being objective reporters, have strong opinions and influence on society, much more than I thought. (People like Kirsty Wark, Andrew Neil, Allan Little, and of course the Scotsman and Glasgow Herald in Scotland’s case).

Number three: to get across a message that the media find difficult or politically incorrect requires one to be broadcast live and find a bypass to their own, powerfully edited broadcasts.

Number four: the UK has essentially no nationwide industrial policy and is trapped by a false propaganda that industry is an international free market. The USA, China, Germany, Japan and France in no way act as if there is an international free market system. They are totally controlled by national industrial interest – especially in oil, gas, defence and aerospace. The global free market is a myth that has damaged the UK’s economy.

Finally: I learnt the power of clever, bite-sized messaging. I saw the importance of getting successive Prime Ministers to acknowledge in their speeches that the UK is “the second largest Aerospace and Defence country in the world after the USA” – people genuinely thought it was France. I also thought it was important for them to acknowledge that if you add up all the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Aerospace and Defence in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, the UK SME industry is larger than that sum.

You aim to avoid politics but have some history in this field. How does this fit in with the stated apolitical aims of the book?

Although I was briefly involved in the Better Together campaign as part of my job, my heart wasn’t totally in it, as I felt that the campaign failed to make a positive case for how Scotland could be a successful part of the Union in the future. But I am not a particular fan of the SNP either. I am a bit more of a pragmatist than an idealist. I simply want Scotland to do well in finding a positive new role in the world, whether within a more federated UK or as an Independent nation and whether in or out of Europe.