Meeting of the Parliament 28 May 2026 [Draft]
I welcome everyone to their new roles, including the ministers and shadow ministers.
I am delighted to rise to give my first speech. I believe that this Parliament and this Government need massive change, so I am encouraged by some of the talk of change that we have heard so far, especially the contributions from the Presiding Officer and his deputies. However, I remain concerned that real change will remain elusive and that this Parliament and, especially, this continuity Government remain out of touch, wholly self-satisfied and in a Marie Antoinette-like bubble. Nowhere is that more apparent than on energy policy. Energy reality simply does not seem to get past the outer walls here.
Scotland, the UK and, indeed, much of Europe face the simple reality that our energy system is not working. We have a fragile and overstretched grid that is struggling to deal with intermittent renewables, unable to cope with growth opportunities such as those from artificial intelligence and, increasingly, at risk of failure. We have a growing reliance on imported energy, particularly via French interconnectors and liquefied natural gas tankers, and we are destroying our own oil and gas industry, despite needing oil and gas for decades.
However, the main area of failure is the cost of our new energy system. We are facing an energy price crisis. Extremely high prices are hurting consumers and, perhaps most obviously, we have the highest industrial energy prices in the world, which are driving deindustrialisation. The damage from that is clear to see. Our primary steel industry across Scotland and the UK has nearly been lost. Industries including chemicals, pharmaceuticals and ceramics have all been hammered.
Across the board, manufacturing is at a huge disadvantage due to high costs. That is more obvious in Scotland, with the closures of the Grangemouth refinery, the Mossmorran plant and the Alexander Dennis bus factory in Falkirk.
Those problems are not caused by temporary gas price spikes; they are caused by net zero policies, particularly the overuse of expensive and intermittent renewables in the system—[Interruption.]