The SNP’s North Sea hypocrisy

The Labour party has run into trouble in Scotland. It is planning to both raise and extend the windfall tax on the oil and gas sector, and industry chiefs aren’t happy. It’s an issue that is steadily gathering momentum and could prove damaging to the party’s chances north of the border.

Last week, the Press and Journal depicted Keir Starmer, Anas Sarwar, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves as hooded bad guys from the BBC’s Traitors series, with one of its writers commenting that ‘Labour – the party of workers and unions – is happy to cast tens of thousands of hard-working men and women on the scrapheap, and place a world class Scottish industry on death row.’

Labour’s plans were then dragged back into the limelight after the Scottish Labour conference concluded in Glasgow on Sunday. Only hours after Keir Starmer spoke of how the ‘the prosperity oil and gas could have brought’ had been ‘squandered’ by the governing party, industry chiefs raised concerns that tens of thousands of North Sea jobs risked being wiped out as a result of Labour’s tax plans.