Scotland counts the cost of industrial bail-outs

IN ONE SHED a worker tests welding guns, alone but for the radio. In the next a crew admires a machine fresh in from the Netherlands, which cuts steel pipes to elegant curves. By mid-August the air will be thick with fumes and sparks. Some 400 workers will assemble steel into latticed tripods, 20 storeys high. In the spring these will be towed out in the Firth of Forth and dropped to the seabed. A wind turbine will be fixed atop, sweeping 200m above the waves. They will form part of the Neart Na Gaoithe array, built by the state-owned electricity firms of France and Ireland, EDF and ESB.

The work is a boon for Methil, a poor former mining town. It may turn out to be a bargain for InfraStrata, the engineering firm that now owns Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilder of the Titanic. It bought the fabrication yard, plus a second on the Isle of Lewis, in February in a deal worth £850,000 ($1.2m), after BiFab, its previous owner, went into administration. But it is a bad deal for Scottish taxpayers, whose government had pumped loans totalling £51m into BiFab as it struggled to survive.

It was the latest in a streak of losing bets for the Scottish government. In 2013 it bought Prestwick Airport, near Glasgow, for £1, citing its strategic value. But it has made little profit since; £43m in state loans...