Actor SIR Sean Connery's political allegiances have cost his native Scotland a major film studio, he claims. The former James Bond star insists his refusal to switch loyalties from the Scottish Nationalist Party to the Labour party scuppered any chance the nation had to receive funding for a multi-million pound studio near their capital city of Edinburgh. Despite personally pledging GBP1 million ($2 million) for the project in 1998, Connery claims Labour leader and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was uninterested in the venture unless the celebrity backer changed allegiances to his party. He says, "I told him I wanted to build a studio outside Edinburgh, to be the top point of a triangle with (other big British studios) Shepperton and Pinewood, so that they could all be interconnected. "It was never exactly spelt out, but it became clear that anything associated with myself was not going to be accepted. "They would have been perfectly happy if I joined Labour... There was no way I would consider going back to Labour, and so the thing just petered out."