SCOTLAND’S Oil is back! Forecasts of £13bn oil revenues this year have put a spring in nationalist steps. Fossil fuels have closed the GERS fiscal gap and the independence numbers add up once again, according to John Swinney.

But what about keeping it in the ground? This time last year Nicola Sturgeon was collecting selfies with Saint Greta and greenwashing capitalists at COP26 and promising to abandon fossil fuels altogether.

Cambo no more she declared. Jackdaw no more. Rosebank no more. Big Oil no more – except, it seems, for the oil revenues generated by the wicked capitalists. Is the economic case for independence once again based on “destroying the planet”?

The SNP leader’s green fundamentalism has come back to bite her on the derriere.

She cannot in all seriousness go back to basing the economic case for independence on a source of energy which she has denounced and on oil companies that she has demonised as profiteering climate deniers.

Yet the run up to next year’s independence referendum, if it happens, will be dominated by Yes campaigners claiming that there’s still 20 billion barrels of Scotland’s Oil and that it’s being stolen by Westminster. As in the 2014 campaign, oil is the only way to make the economics of independence stack up.


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“Want to be part of a rich country?” said those Yes Scotland leaflets showing oil rigs and Norway’s oil fund. They didn’t depict Scots as tartan sheiks, as the SNP did in the 1970s but it wasn’t far off.

The coalition with the Scottish Greens is beginning to look like a cynical sham. Green ministers Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater cannot surely remain in the Scottish Government after this lurch back to fossil fuel triumphalism.

The SNPs coalition partners are dedicated to halting oil and gas production altogether. Stop oil, they say, just stop. Keep It In the Ground.

There is already grumbling in the Green party over their leaders’ involvement with the Scottish Government. If they swallow this they’ll be seen as collaborators.

As some of us pointed out at the time of the Green/SNP coalition, the SNP is a hydrocarbons party. Scotland’s Oil is in its DNA. Older SNP members always thought it was nonsense to dismiss this valuable natural resource and the many jobs in oil and gas.

Most nationalists accept the science of climate change and support the transition to net zero. But it was politically inept to suggest that we could do without fossil fuels any time soon. The International Energy Authority says we will need them for the next 35 years at least.

So why import oil and gas from Saudi Arabia if there’s still hydrocarbon reserves in Scottish waters?

Norway never made that mistake. It is held up as a paragon of sustainability yet is now drilling in the Arctic. The energy crisis has exposed the hypocrisy of greenwashing governments.