Records of exports simply weren't kept or have since been lost.

This is utter garbage. Every port in the Empire kept records of what goods went and out, and what the market rate for them was. (In the case of Leith, the one I've read most about, you only needed to look in the daily paper, which had columns about freight movements and commodity prices).

Whatever "qualifications" Davies may have been awarded by ruling-class finishing schools like St Andrews, he's an ultra-right Tory ideologue who wouldn't know a historical truth if it bit him in the arse.

The British state knew what it was doing. They'd administered a famine on the same scale in India fifty years before, had tried to use famine as a weapon during the American War of Independence, and casually sat back and let Shetland starve in the late 1780s. It wasn't like this sort of phenomenon was anything new to them. And no this was NOT the "English" - the guy in charge of India during the famine was Henry Dundas, the most powerful politician in Scotland, and the Scottish elite was still playing a disproportionate role in running the Empire two generations later.