Photo by GenghiskhanvietAfter all, haven't we got incredibly strict safety laws after the, er, last thing to go wrong?
The First Minister, Alex Salmond, demonstrated in the Scottish Parliament today that he, too, believes that nothing can ever go wrong with an oil rig in Scottish waters purely by the magic of being in Scottish waters.
His EU colleagues don't agree. They want a moratorium on deep-sea drilling in European waters.
As journalist Hamish MacDonell put it on the BBC straight afterwards, and again in this Caledonian Mercury piece, Salmond was asked by Patrick Harvie to choose between the environment and oil.
He chose oil.
It's probably just as well that he cancelled his trip to the Maldives. Can you imagine him trying to explain that he was sorry that they were about to lose their homes, but he wanted to start a giant oil fund that could be used to keep the Scots in the manner to which they had become accustomed, with shiny new roads and bridges and airports and...
2 comments:
The thing which really gets me about this obsession with Oil is that on the one hand Salmond says he wants to build up a fund similar to Norway, but on the other hand, he uses the income from the Oil to balance the books in the hypothetical independant Scotland. Double counting.
But then I have serious doubts that the SNP really cares about the environment, when they have such projects as duallign the A9, Second Forth crossing, etc, which projects such as the Edinburgh Trams are denigrated, and the Borders Rail Link delayed.
I used to think that Salmond was trying to drag the SNP out of the 1970s mindset of oil & independence, but now I'm not so sure he can.
They've campaigned for "Scotland's Oil" for so long that it's going to take something monstrous to get them out of that.
I just hope that "something monstrous" isn't a campaign for "It's Scotland's Oilspill"
There's nothing to stop him campaigning for a renewables fund, using money generated from a takeover of the Crown Estate. But it doesn't lend itself to easy slogans and arguments.
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