Will Nicola ban fracking or lead a drive for jobs?
THERE has been some muttering in England over the fact that all of the UK’s election-winning, graduate Prime Ministers since Clement Attlee were educated at the same university – Oxford.
In that context, it is worth noting that, in Scotland, we have had five First Ministers from four different universities: Heriot-Watt, Stirling, St Andrews and Glasgow (which claimed two, Donald Dewar and Nicola Sturgeon).
A tiny example perhaps, but it does show our political elite in Scotland isn’t quite as narrow as the grumblers would have us believe.
IT has emerged that a German guide book is tipping the ‘charismatic’ Nicola Sturgeon to lead Scotland to independence this year. Just to put that prediction into perspective, the Marco Polo Spiral Guide to Scotland also claimed that ‘when Scots used to live on root vegetables, oats and fish, they were as fit as a fiddle’.
I think I’ll take both claims with a pinch of salt – and maybe some vitamin D to keep the rickets at bay.
WHEN you get a leaflet through the door from a charity or an environmental pressure group, you expect the stuff in it to be accurate, don’t you? Well, so does the UK’s advertising watchdog – which is why its decision last week to slap down Friends of the Earth over fracking was so revealing.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the green lobby group not to repeat misleading claims about the controversial method of extracting oil and gas from shale.
It had claimed chemicals used in fracking caused cancer and could pollute drinking water. It also implied the process raised the risk of asthma. All of these bogus claims were condemned as misleading, with the ASA telling it to take them off its leaflets.
This was a pretty important development, if only because we are still in limbo over fracking here in Scotland.
All we have heard from the SNP administration is the same deafening silence it has maintained since it came to power in 2007, repeatedly dodging around the issue, scared to go near it in case it actually has to make a decision.
This year, we are supposed to get yet another consultation on fracking and yet more reports. We have been having discussions, consultations and reports for years now, so it’s difficult to see how another round is going to make any difference.
It already looks as if 2017 is going to be characterised by yet more talk, more prevarication and more inaction.
Well, this can’t go on. This is something that can’t be dodged any longer and, crucially, is where this rebuke of Friends Of The Earth is so timely.
For years, environmental groups such as Friends Of The Earth have enjoyed general good will – if not always outright support – because they always seemed to represent the plucky little guy against corporate baddies.
Environmental lobbying took time to establish a good reputation for thorough research and those involved were always seen as well-meaning – if not always practical or economically astute.
But this warning has gone a long way to blowing that reputation for integrity out of the water.
At a stroke, that veneer of wellmeaning honesty has been shown to be exactly that, a glossy cover. Underneath, the environmentalists’ true colours – where some of them have been prepared to say absolutely anything, however outrageous, to make their case – has been exposed.
MISS Sturgeon knows the environmental lobby has a strong hold on the SNP. Indeed, if the activists who turn up to conference had their way, fracking would already be banned. But she also knows she has to represent the whole of Scotland and, more importantly, she knows an independent Scotland would need a strong industrial base to survive, which would be all but impossible without fracking.
The First Minister has been edging towards a ban on fracking for some time now, without ever making a proper decision, perhaps because she knows that, if she rejects it, the economic damage to Scotland’s chances of independence could be terminal.
Everyone in government knows the Ineos plant at Grangemouth, which processes American fracked gas, is really the only big industrial base left in Scotland.
It is sitting there, waiting to process fracked gas from Scotland, gas which could give Scotland its second fossil fuel boom and provide the manufacturing and industrial base on which the economy could rest.
Miss Sturgeon also knows that, if she was to turn against fracking, that Ineos investment could shrink and fade away to nothing, at a stroke eroding Scotland’s ability to pay its own way in the world as an independent nation.
There are some in the SNP who understand there is a salutary political lesson to be gleaned from Scottish Labour’s approach to fracking.
Kezia Dugdale’s party is stridently anti-fracking, stubbornly unaware of the irony of supposedly being the party of the working man, yet, at the same time, determined to turn its back on the opportunity of creating thousands of good industrial jobs in the heart of Scotland.
Labour has become so ‘metropolitan and liberal’ that it is beginning to lose touch with its working-class roots.
BUT it doesn’t have to be that way for the SNP. Miss Sturgeon can listen to the now suspect claims warning that fracking will destroy us all – or she can occupy the ground vacated by Labour and represent the working men and women of the Central Belt who will thrive if the country embraces this major industry.
If nothing else, the smack on the wrists for Friends Of The Earth should be a clear reminder that not everything the environmental lobby says can be trusted.
What Miss Sturgeon cannot do is delay any longer. Is she going to back the environmental flatearthers and their now disputed claims about calamities waiting for us in a world of fracking, or is she going to revive Scotland’s industrial base and support working-class jobs?
If 2017 is to mean anything, it has to mean a decision on this issue, which will define what sort of Scotland we are going to live in for decades. Everyone in Scotland – not just those who stand to get good, secure jobs as a result – deserves no less.