For nearly half a century, the Scottish National Party based its independence project on ‘Scotland’s Oil’ which it claimed had been stolen by England. Now the SNP seems to be saying it wasn’t Scotland’s oil at all and wasn’t even the UK’s to steal. The SNP and their Green coalition partners have discovered that North Sea oil is owned by foreign capitalists and is anyway unusable in the UK.
‘Most of this oil will be shipped abroad,’ insisted the SNP First Minister, Humza Yousaf, last week ‘and then sold back to us at whatever price makes the oil and gas industry most profit’. New fields like Rosebank off Shetland, he says, won’t therefore help reduce energy bills or replace oil and gas imports.
This has been the thrust of the SNP’s attack on Rishi Sunak’s promise to extract ‘every drop’ of North Sea oil to give the UK greater energy security. ‘It’s the greatest act of environmental vandalism in my lifetime,’ according to Nicola Sturgeon.
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