Rishi Sunak’s North Sea oil and gas announcement wrong-footed the SNP like Lionel Messi ghosting past a half cut Sunday morning league defender.
The Tory prime minister caught the main nationalist party dozing when he confirmed 100 new licences for the Rosebank development west of Shetland.
As a capitalist Sunak has spotted a gap in the climate market and he intends to corner it.
The PM – along with the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer who wants to replace him – have cottoned on to the fact the majority of voters, while sympathetic to a cleaner environment, are now waking up to the enormous costs to them in trying to achieve it, with no guarantees that we can.
Net Zero now has holes large enough to drive several diesel double deck buses through it.
And all because the greens and the climate lobby are incapable of empathising with genuine concerns and fears of the majority.
Folk are more frightened of freezing in the darkness of winter with the lights out than they are of the end of the world; something members of the climate lobby have prophesied for so many years that it’s lost its fear factor.
‘Muddled thinking of SNP’
As a bonus ball for Sunak this week the SNP leadership were also caught on the hop when he drove headlong into them over their failure to deliver on dualling the A9.
But that’s mere bagatelle amid their current travails over climate and their muddled thinking on the matter.
Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, was well and truly snared by Sunak’s announcement of the carbon capture funding.
With one eye firmly fixed on his election prospects in the North East and retaining his seat, he admitted the Tory policy was “very good news”.
That stance will be as welcome with Patrick Harvie and the Greens at Holyrood as an oil slick in the Forth.
That the prospect of 21,000 jobs, in an area of Scotland which has felt increasingly ignored by the Holyrood establishment, comes via a Tory government at Westminster drills right into the heart of the SNP’s current problems.
Climate concerns are only a part of their difficulties.
I sense an increasing frustration among those sympathetic to independence (and those numbers are becoming fewer by the day) over an inability to manage our affairs in education, health, policing, and a dozen other areas with even a modicum of efficiency or competence.
You can only cry wolf and blame the nasty Tories so often.
Voters can now see, in many cases, they’re represented at Holyrood by folk you wouldn’t trust to run a bath lest they flood the downstairs neighbours.
‘Inconvenient truths’
By 2050 a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas but the climate cavalry, aided and abetted by the SNP, are prepared to permit penury for the population to sanctify their self-righteous environmental stance
An inconvenient truth pointed out by even those who aren’t denying much of the climate science is that in Scotland and the UK, whatever we do in the climate campaign is the equivalent of tossing a glass of water into the North Sea to raise its level.
Our efforts by comparison to the havoc wreaked by the behemoths of China and India are drops in the ocean.
Add in the fact that Germany is firing up its coal fired power stations again and it’s not hard to see that many folk are concluding that if we’re going to hell in a handcart, we might as well do it with our lights still on and our rooms still cosy.
‘Twitter gurners’
I’ve never met Elon Musk and it’s unlikely I ever will.
However I’m grateful to him for giving me a platform on Twitter which allows me to chew the fat, generally indulge in nonsense and disseminate my Courier column and other thoughts to the world at large, or more precisely to the 85.5k thousand followers daft enough to put up with my musings.
Mr Musk gives me this facility free.
I could pay him for the blue tick which some folk think bestows a special status but I’m just delighted he allows me a platform free gratis which is a valuable means of communication and a bit of fun into the bargain.
Many folk have a problem with him and his ownership of Twitter.
He recently rebranded it with an X instead of a blue bird which has caused me no appreciable problems whatsoever, and yet some gurners have complained about that too.
Many moaners complain about Twitter and some have left for other lesser online services, only to return with tails between their legs.
It seems even giving stuff away free in today’s world doesn’t absolve you from criticism but Musk’s free Twitter still smells good to me.
