The Supreme Court’s oil ruling spells trouble for the SNP

Judges on the Supreme Court appear to have joined Just Stop Oil. In a landmark ruling, with profound implications for the UK energy industry, they’ve said that Surrey County Council cannot give permission to drill new wells on an existing extraction site, Horse Hill, which already has a couple of them. This is because the oil might be burnt – which admittedly tends to happen with hydrocarbon fuels. Net Zero campaigners who brought the original action against the ‘Gatwick Gusher’ as they called it back in 2019 are ‘over the moon’. The Scottish government, however, is not quite so sanguine.

Could the ruling mean the end of oil and gas fields, such as Rosebank off Shetland and Jackdaw off Aberdeen? The SNP has only recently revised Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘presumption against exploration’ and her opposition to lucrative oil fields like Cambo. 

Last week, the new deputy first minister, Kate Forbes, coolly announced that the SNP had never opposed