The SNP risks facing in two directions on oil and gas
The upcoming SNP conference in Aberdeen is going to feature a somewhat surprising appearance by Scottish Greens co-leader Gillian Mackay in a panel on Scottish independence.
It’s not unprecedented for political parties to invite representatives from other parties to their conferences – Greens often host talks from members in the broader international Green movement, and the SNP often host members from fellow travellers in other pro-independence parties. It’s also true that while in the EU the SNP and Scottish Greens were part of the same Green-EFA family, and that the two parties were in a brief, if ill-fated, cooperation agreement within the Scottish Government just a few years ago.
So while it’s not necessarily surprising that the Greens may make an appearance at an SNP conference, there has been a surprising amount of backlash from some members to the idea largely because while the two parties are aligned in the concept of independence and fairly aligned at least on the concept of a climate emergency – when it comes to support for the oil and gas sector and the fate specifically of the economy of Aberdeen, they are probably at their furthest apart.
The SNP are still in favour of reducing or cancelling the UK’s Energy Profits Levy on oil and gas firms, which looks increasingly out of step during a time when oil firms (at least those outwith the Middle East) are reaping vast profits from the disruptions caused by the USA’s war with Iran. They have also been criticised for not doing nearly enough to meet their promises around creating a Just Transition for oil and gas workers. A report last month found that, rather than workers being actively pulled away from the fossil fuel sector and drawn into equivalent jobs in renewables, around 24,000 workers have lost their jobs in oil and gas without such replacement. There is a significant risk that the party will react to this kind of news by trying to slow down or (more futilely) reverse the decline of fossil fuels rather than try to accelerate alternatives.
This, however, risks contradicting other stated goals around Net Zero and climate adaptations that are still Government policy, and even if they weren’t, the decline of the North Sea as a sector is inevitable, and the impacts on Aberdeen should be front and centre of economic discussions. Similarly, the Government’s approach to new oil and gas, such as the Rosebank field, has been to oppose new extraction if it doesn’t meet “climate criteria” but also refuse to define what criteria they would want to see or if they think fields like Rosebank specifically would meet them.
One of the underlying problems uniting all of this is the tendency of the SNP to try to govern day by day and announcement by announcement. It becomes all too easy to lose sight of overall visions and goals, to get bogged down in minutiae or – as appears to be the case here – to end up facing in two directions at once, attempting to tell two different groups what they want to hear. To Scotland as a whole, that climate change is important and oil workers deserve a Just Transition and to Aberdeen specifically, that climate change is not important and that oil must flow.
This can’t end well. At best, it risks annoying one of those two groups when the tension of the opposition positions forces the party to come down on one of them. At worst, it results in what often happens when someone tries to ride two horses in opposite directions – they end up sitting on the ground with no horse at all.