SNP ‘sell out Scotland’

Failure to support Cambo oil field seen as appeasing Greens

THE SNP Government has been accused of ‘selling out Scotland’ after it failed to back a motion supporting the proposed Cambo oil field.

While Nicola Sturgeon has yet to say whether she is in favour of plans for extraction at the site off Shetland, she has asked Boris Johnson to review a licence previously granted.

The Scottish Conservatives yesterday prompted a debate at Holyrood on the controversial site, urging MSPs to ‘support new oil and gas projects’, including Cambo.

The party’s motion, brought forward by Liam Kerr, stated that a strong North Sea sector supports ‘tens of thousands of Scottish jobs’ and said extraction in Scotland was ‘preferable to increasing energy imports during the transition to net zero’.

Mr Kerr’s motion was rejected but an amended version was passed, in which the SNP failed to take a position on Cambo. Instead, it said that MSPs recognise ‘how important the oil and gas industry, infrastructure, highly skilled workforce and supply chain are to Scotland’, adding it ‘agrees that countries around the world cannot continue to maximise recovery of hydrocarbons’ on the way to net zero. The Government amendment also said that the UK ‘cannot ignore the concern that unlimited extraction of fossil fuels is simply incompatible with protecting the planet’.

Conservative MSP Douglas Lumsden said: ‘What we see from the SNP is more deflect, dither and delay.

‘The SNP motion before us is to appease the Greens and nothing else, it sells out Scotland and it sells out Aberdeen.’

Mr Lumsden, who represents the North-East, warned that thousands of jobs could be lost in the oil and gas industry.

He said: ‘We will support jobs, we will welcome investment, we do support a cleaner, greener energy sector and we will not abandon the people of the North-East of Scotland.’

But Scotland’s Minister for Just Transition Richard Lochhead said: ‘We should be focusing on the just transition and the energy transition, which is the biggest part of that transition given the reliance of jobs on the energy sector in this country.

‘This is a massive opportunity for our economy and for the future of Scotland, not only to create 100,000 jobs here but to export our expertise and our knowledge... to the rest of the planet and economies around the world.’

Controversy around the proposed Cambo field has been growing ahead of the COP26 summit, with the UK Government being urged to scrap the licence.