Meeting of the Parliament 26 November 2025
I could not agree more with Mr Ewing. The sad fact is that not only is Norway producing more, it is actually selling to us. Norway is producing oil and gas from the basin where we are choosing to leave them in the ground.
I also get angry with the Scottish National Party. If we have a presumption against new oil and gas, this is where it leads us. We cannot say that we do not want home-grown oil and gas and then shed crocodile tears when no new oil and gas means that jobs are lost, infrastructure is no longer needed and the only transition that people face is moving from Scotland to Stavanger.
Our motion puts it plainly: Scotland’s Government has adopted a
“presumption against new oil and gas exploration and production”—
an approach that is not only economically reckless but blatantly disconnected from Scotland’s energy reality. The SNP says that it is about climate leadership, but its own documents admit that we will need oil and gas for some time as part of the journey to a transition. The truth is unavoidable. If we turn off domestic supply, Scotland will not consume less oil and gas—we will simply import more foreign energy at higher carbon intensity, supporting jobs abroad.
The SNP’s position is not climate leadership but climate hypocrisy. Meanwhile, communities in the north-east—my constituents—are paying the price. The SNP supports a just transition, but it cannot explain why the north-east has lost three oil and gas jobs for every one clean energy job that has been created over the past decade. It cannot explain why more than 13,000 Scottish oil and gas jobs have been lost in a single year, with employment now almost half of what it was in 2013. It is time to call this out for what it is—an ideological campaign against a sector that Scotland still relies on.
What about the SNP’s energy strategy and just transition plan? It will soon be three years since it produced the draft. Where is it? Is the SNP Government incompetent or untruthful?