Fracking up Scotland's back yard

From today's Daily Record column.

Scottish environmentalists are celebrating renewables overtaking nuclear as the biggest source of electricity production. 

Sure, every turn of the turbine blades is one less unit of carbon produced. 

But rows over windfarms in the landscape will be a summer picnic compared to the forthcoming war over fracking. 

Fracking, extracting shale gas and oil by drilling underground, is a very messy business. Just ask them in boomtime North Dakota where land and lives around the one million barrels a day industry are ruined.

Fracking is going to be big business in Scotland.

Ineos, the operators of Grangemouth chemicals works, have staked the future of the plant on shale gas.

The company has ambitious plans to ship shale gas from the USA.

But Ineos has also bought two big licences to frack in Scotland, covering 700 square kilometres around Grangemouth and stretching across the central belt like the coalmines once did.

It has also applied for further licences from the UK government.

Under Smith licencing is to be devolved to Holyrood, but the Scottish government already has an effective veto on fracking.

Planning permission is local and the permit regime, to drill a hole you need about nine of them, is managed by SEPA, the arms-length Scottish environmental agency.

Scottish politicians just need to tweak the planning regime and the permit conditions to stop the industry in it’s tracks. But will they?

Both governments bent over backwards to keep the Grangemouth open two years ago despite the atrocious treatment of trade union reps.

So where will they stand when fracking wars start? This is not a problem we can park at Westminster’s door. The solution is in our own back yard.

Not a good look

The SNP numpties who set fire to the Smith Commission report need to read more, not less.

How about starting with “The Complete Idiot’s guide to Nazi Germany”?

The last time people started burning books in Europe it didn’t end well. Suspension isn’t enough.

Mags MacLaran, warming her fingers by the blaze, is twice-paid from the public purse - as a councillor and staffer for Cabinet Secretary Derek Mackay. Book-burning or democracy, which does he endorse?

Choose a tune to play

One minute she’s comparing herself to civil rights legend Rosa Parks and the next Nicola Sturgeon is assuring businesses they have nothing to fear from her conversion to land reform.

Two weeks in the job and she’s playing more tunes than the accordionist at my birthday party.

When friends in the north of England look at the SNP they don’t see nationalists, they just see right-wing politicians waving a Saltire.

No surprise to them that John Swinney didn’t welcome the Smith Commission’s tax-raising powers