The Ming Yang case has exposed a negligent failure on the part of Scotland's two governments

At the latest Scottish Affairs Committee hearing this month familiar frictions between the SNP and the UK Government surfaced as Douglas Alexander sought to clarify when the UK Government became involved in persuading US President Donald Trump to drop his tariff on Scotch whisky.

The Scottish Secretary was clearly irritated by the political capital that John Swinney had accumulated through being pictured in the Oval Office as the first minister sought to make his case for exemption. “Donald Trump doesn’t give gifts, he does deals. And the counterparty for those deals being done is the UK Government,” Alexander said, pointedly.

This stramash by the mash tun is the latest in a series of petty frictions between the Scottish and UK governments. The latest is who said what, when, about a plan to house asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks in Inverness.

While it’s bound to get worse as May election hustings start in earnest, little of it may ultimately matter much if, as we are told, relations between London and Edinburgh are fundamentally in a better place than they were under Conservative rule from Westminster.

Yet throw China, investment and national security into the mix, and this tiresome devolution dynamic highlights a concerning constitutional faultline that both governments must recognise and address.

When the prospect of investment from China comes into view – as it has done under plans by wind turbine manufacturer Ming Yang to enter the UK’s energy supply chain – the rules of engagement between Holyrood and Westminster must involve seamless policy engagement in the wider UK interest, right from the start. I say this because the Ming Yang case has exposed a negligent failure to do so.

The Guangdong-based company appears to have started engaging with the Scottish Government and its investment agencies, Scottish Development International and Scottish Enterprise, in early 2022 about plans to build a factory in Scotland to make wind turbine blades – the company’s first outside China. The Crown Estate Scotland leasing round for ScotWind had just happened, setting the stage for Scotland’s emergence as a global leader in offshore wind.

This followed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the then-Conservative government in December 2021 for Ming Yang to enter the UK. It was the company’s only statement of its intentions until an announcement last month that it would invest up to £1.5bn in a turbine blade factory at Ardesier Port, near Inverness.

In the ensuing two years Scottish Government agencies – with the “cover” of the MOU with the UK Government – engaged with Ming Yang in commercial discussions about the factory. Ming Yang specialises in turbines for the deep water “floating” wind farms that make up 60 per cent of ScotWind.

The forum through which much of this happened was an innovative industry mechanism set up in conjunction with Scottish Government in 2023 called the Strategic Investment Model (SIM) to kick start an offshore wind supply chain. Ming Yang’s factory was earmarked for £30m in Scottish taxpayer support under the SIM, which also enabled investment in XLCC’s Hunterston cable factory.

Yet throughout this period there was, as far as I can glean, little pro-active engagement by the UK Government with the SIM and the Scottish Government. This matters because of the national security issues that flow from the prospect of digital technology (like turbines) from China being installed in the UK’s critical energy infrastructure. The UK Government, which in the recent National Security Strategy identified China as a “geo-strategic challenge”, should have been “in the room” early on, asking questions about Ming Yang.

At the same time, while it was legitimate for the Scottish Government to engage in commercial discussions with Ming Yang, its filter-free approach looks like another example of its often geopolitically naïve approach to China – an approach that’s not without its critics from within SNP ranks, including from the top.

In her memoir Frankly, former first minister Nicola Sturgeon writes of how her view of China changed after the 2016 saga involving an ill-fated MOU with SinoFortune and China Railway No. 3 Engineering Group. “We must still be wary of allowing China to become ever more enmeshed in huge swathes of our lives, from critical national infrastructure to technology to universities, and much more besides,” she writes.

For its part, China says it “stands against overstretching the concept of national security”. Its embassy in London warns against “rehashing the absurd notion of ‘China threat’” as this would “seriously weigh on Chinese companies’ assessment on the investment environment of the UK and their prudent decisions”.

The UK Government finally got to grips with Ming Yang late last year and ScotWind developers await a decision on whether it can be allowed into the UK. But valuable time has been lost, and the policy dilemma is now acute: allow Ming Yang in and prioritise green investment from China or block it and put ScotWind at risk?

As James Kynge, senior research fellow for China and the World at Chatham House, puts it: “The expertise required to judge such vulnerabilities is highly technical. It should not be held hostage to political considerations either in Westminster or between Westminster and Holyrood.”