Chamber and committees

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

Scotland’s coastal communities are being asked yet again to carry costs that other parts of the country will never see and to absorb disruption that other industries would never accept.

The Government knows that,

“By supporting the expansion of offshore wind development in Scottish waters and increasing the demand on marine space for the implementation of compensatory measures, the policy is anticipated to have a negative impact on fisheries.”

Fishermen are being asked to pay for net zero twice: first, through disruption to their jobs and displacement of their place of work; then, potentially, again through new restrictions and closures dressed up as environmental compensation.

It is insane that the Scottish National Party Government wants to damage fishing grounds in order to hit its net zero targets by building ever bigger wind farms out at sea. Even more scandalously, it wants to solve that damage by restricting fishing, all but destroying the livelihoods of the fishermen who fish those same waters. Let me repeat that: the Government wants to ruin the livelihoods of our fishing communities by building turbines, then penalise those same communities for that decision. Clearly, this rotten Government will not be happy until every fish and meat producer in the north-east is driven out of business.

The fishing community is clear: it does not want this. It is overwhelmingly opposed to the measures. There needs to be proper compensation in place—[Interruption.]

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

—for our fishers, who are seeing their fishing grounds removed by offshore wind and, now, compensation measures for wind energy in completely different parts of the country that have also had their fishing grounds taken away.

We all know that, and we all know the Government’s dirty little secret when it comes to energy infrastructure: the SNP does not care if you object to wind turbines in your fishing zones and it certainly does not care if you have pylons in your back garden—[Interruption.]

—because you know what? It is going to try to build them anyway. Coastal communities are realising what communities across the Mearns, Turriff, Oldmeldrum and so many other communities across Scotland have known for years: that this rotten SNP Government does not care. It cares about an arbitrary net zero target and about selling off as much of Scotland’s countryside and fishing grounds as possible to the highest bidder. It is selling Scotland down the river—literally.

My constituents are at the cliff edge of the so-called transition. According to a recent Jobs Foundation report, the truth is that the Scottish Government has no just transition plan and no energy strategy, and we have a jobs emergency in the north-east.

Will the First Minister support oil and gas workers, and finally back projects such as Rosebank, Jackdaw and Cambo, so that we can have a managed transition?

My constituents are at the cliff edge of the so-called transition. According to a recent Jobs Foundation report, the truth is that the Scottish Government has no just transition plan and no energy strategy, and we have a jobs emergency in the north-east.

Will the First Minister support oil and gas workers, and finally back projects such as Rosebank, Jackdaw and Cambo, so that we can have a managed transition?

My constituents are at the cliff edge of the so-called transition. According to a recent Jobs Foundation report, the truth is that the Scottish Government has no just transition plan and no energy strategy, and we have a jobs emergency in the north-east.

Will the First Minister support oil and gas workers, and finally back projects such as Rosebank, Jackdaw and Cambo, so that we can have a managed transition?

My constituents are at the cliff edge of the so-called transition. According to a recent Jobs Foundation report, the truth is that the Scottish Government has no just transition plan and no energy strategy, and we have a jobs emergency in the north-east.

Will the First Minister support oil and gas workers, and finally back projects such as Rosebank, Jackdaw and Cambo, so that we can have a managed transition?

If there is an email address, that is fantastic, but the letter that we were sent by Ivan McKee is quite clear: objections have to be made by filling in a web form or sending them in by post.

We have to make it easy for people to lodge an objection, but it seems that everything that the ECU has done over the past month has been an attempt to make it harder for people. I think that that is an outrage to democracy.

The Government has been trying to shut up rural communities, because it does not want to listen. We know that the recent proposals for the Tealing to Kintore and Peterhead to Beauly power lines generated more than 10,000 objections—most of them by email, I would think. The Government wants to shut up those communities and railroad all that infrastructure through.

There is a reason for that. We currently have 4.5GW of operational capacity in offshore wind, but the Government’s target is to increase that to 11GW by 2030, and then to a staggering 40GW by 2040. If you think that there are a lot of substations and battery storage, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because things will get a lot worse in order to support that intermittent energy source.

Let us burst the cheap energy bubble right now: offshore wind is not cheap. The amount of floating offshore wind that is planned is horrendously expensive, and when we add to that the storage, network and stability costs, we can see why our bills are going through the roof.

How good it would be if the Government had an energy strategy so that we could actually see what it was trying to do. I suspect, however, that we do not have an energy strategy because the Government does not want us to see what it wants to do. It does not want to show people how much more of that infrastructure they will have to put up with, and it does not want workers in the oil and gas industry to know that it does not want to see the industry continue.

Communities in North East Scotland are fed up with being ignored. They have had enough—they are fed up with being the ones who suffer in our headlong dash for net zero without any view to the real-life consequences of energy transmission projects. Most of all, those communities are fed up with being ignored by the out-of-touch, out-of-sight, out-of-ideas SNP Government. Communities such as Kintore, Tealing, the Mearns, Peterhead and New Deer are all fed up. The Government should stop shutting them down, stop building monster pylons in our back gardens, stop being cloth-eared, and start listening to the communities throughout Scotland that are saying no to monster pylons.