Chamber and committees

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome you to your place. I also congratulate the member for Aberdeen Central on a fine maiden speech. It was an excellent and erudite tour of the granite city. Whether in the granite city or the sandstone city that I represent, the challenges that our people face are very similar.

However, I am afraid that the Government’s motion is merely an economic and political sleight of hand. “Scotland’s energy in Scotland’s hands” is certainly a plausible and intuitive slogan to anyone who cares about our country’s interests, but the stark reality behind it is the SNP’s 20-year betrayal of our nation’s proud electrical engineering heritage.

For two decades, the SNP Administration has systematically dismantled Scotland’s baseload generating capacity. It has replaced real engineering substance and Scottish ownership with handouts to multinational capital, foreign control, imported infrastructure, and hollow photo opportunities to boot.

We must judge the Government on its record, not its rhetoric. In 2021, we witnessed the spectacle of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon ceremoniously pushing the button to demolish the iconic chimney stack at Longannet power station. It was the ultimate visual metaphor for the Government: destroying foundational, world-class energy infrastructure without a back-up plan for the sake of a fleeting headline, in defiance of Scotland’s greatest engineering minds.

In 2015, the much-missed Sir Donald Miller, the legendary former chairman of Scottish Power and the foremost electrical engineer of his generation in Scotland—the man who designed Scotland’s post-war electricity supply system—delivered a devastating warning that the Government chose to ignore completely. His prophecy has, sadly, become our painful reality. He warned us plainly that

“The decommissioning of our conventional generation is fast approaching and yet there are no plans to replace the generating capacity at Longannet or the nuclear”

stations. With the closure of Longannet, Scotland will be left with only around half of its peak demand capacity. It is incomprehensible that a country with Scotland’s energy resources should find itself entirely dependent on its neighbour for security of supply.

Sir Donald looked at that trajectory and asked the fundamental question that every member on the Government benches should be forced to answer:

“You may wonder just why Scotland (birthplace of so much engineering) should be importing power we could well generate here, exporting highly skilled jobs in the process.”

He concluded that that drifting, ideologically driven approach would leave Scotland with

“the least reliable and insecure electricity supply that we have seen for a hundred years”

and warned us that failing to secure baseload capacity would make for

“a very long night indeed”

if we did not get it right.

His prediction has proven to be an accurate guide to Scotland’s present reality: because of the Government’s catastrophic mismanagement of our energy sector, Scotland is now regularly forced to import power from England on calm days just to keep the lights on. Scotland has become more dependent on our southern neighbours, not less, due to the Government’s policy.

I thank the cabinet secretary for making that point. The model is challenging. Even when our wind turbines are generating, under the integrated UK market, English bill payers heavily subsidise Scottish grid bottlenecks. Around a quarter of Scotland’s entire wind generation capacity was paid to turn off last year, which accounted for more than 90 per cent of total constraint payments across the Great Britain network.

Members should look at the Moray East wind farm for an example of that. Between September 2021 and September 2023, the owners were paid approximately £100 million in constraint payments just to sit idle. Currently, those costs are socialised across the whole UK market but, if full devolution of energy were to take place, the Scottish Government’s approach to energy would mean that those constraint payment costs would fall entirely on the shoulders of Scottish taxpayers. Contrary to what many speakers on the Government benches have said, further devolution of energy would be neither quick nor cheap for Scotland’s people.

We see the hypocrisy of the motion reach its peak when we look at the SNP’s attitude towards our industrial supply chain. The SNP spent weeks screaming about sabotage when the UK Government rightly blocked the Chinese state-controlled firm Ming Yang from developing a wind turbine factory at Ardersier. However, let us be entirely clear that the European Union explicitly views such state-subsidised entities as a security risk and as systemic rivals to European original equipment manufacturers. We cannot claim to be pro-European while rolling out the red carpet for a foreign supply chain that actively undermines our European allies and undercuts domestic firms. That is geopolitical illiteracy.

Indeed, we can contrast that with the decision to invest—

Will the minister give way?

I am happy to give way if I can have the time back.

Presiding Officer, I welcome you to your position.

Does the Government agree with Glasgow City Council’s claim that it is simply not possible to establish an official managed fan zone because the council cannot bear the burden of the cost? Given that the impact of football in Glasgow is equivalent to hosting a Commonwealth games every year, could the Government show some leadership in pulling together funding between the local authority, national Government, commercial sponsors and the football clubs to establish an official fan zone, to prevent Glasgow’s streets and emergency services from being subjected to entirely preventable disorder every year?

I, Paul John Sweeney, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.