SNP must change its stance on fracking

AND so the pressure on the Scottish Government over fracking ratchets up.

The UK Government has said the process of extracting shale gas from rocks deep beneath Little Plumpton in Lancashire can go ahead.

Westminster’s Communities Secretary Sajid Javid said the shale gas industry would support thousands of jobs and reduce the UK’s reliance on energy imports.

Francis Egan – chief executive of Cuadrilla, the firm behind the Lancashire project – said: ‘We have been through an exhaustive environmental impact assessment on this. We have assessed everything; noise, traffic, water, emissions. The Environment Agency are entirely comfortable with it.’

This is the first tentative step towards catching up with the United States, which is enjoying nothing less than a fracking revolution.

So-called ‘rust belt’ communities have been revitalised by hi-tech jobs and investment and the American energy and petrochemical industries are taking full advantage of cheap, reliable, domestically sourced raw materials.

It could be Scotland’s success story too but we are marooned by an indolent SNP that has imposed a fracking moratorium.

Officially, this halt was for scientific evidence to be gathered – although as a mature industry, the Americans have amassed a welter of such detail on fracking.

No, the moratorium was imposed as a sop to the flat-earthers in the party rank-andfile who are dogmatically opposed to progress.

Many picked up anti-fracking prejudice from a video on YouTube where an American woman sets her tap water alight. This was caused by naturally occurring methane and was nothing to do with fracking. But facts count for little when Nationalists instinctively know they are right.

So will the SNP follow the lead of America and England towards a fracking bonanza, with cheap power and jobs galore?

It could learn from the mistakes made in America in the technique’s early days and impose a state-of-the-art licensing regime to help to deliver a major shot in the arm for the Scottish economy.

Or will it stick with its hopeless infatuation with inefficient and ruinously expensive renewables?

Once again, the initial SNP reaction was to opt for fudge when a difficult decision was required.

But the clock is ticking – and soon it must decide whether to put narrow party concerns before the greater good of Scotland.