Fresh from promising to increase income tax for every taxpayer earning more than £20,000 a year, Scottish Labour has announced it favours a permanent ban on fracking. Kezia Dugdale asks why the Scottish government, which theoretically remains open-minded to fracking in the Central Belt, will not follow suit. The answer is that being in government demands something greater than politically-motivated but juvenile posturing.
Ms Dugdale’s hostility to a source of energy that, experts insist, offers considerable potential to producers, consumers, and communities alike is a further demonstration of the predicament in which the Labour party finds itself. Her party is trapped between its need to differentiate itself from the SNP and its equally necessary need to present itself as a party ready for government. The knee-jerk hostility to fracking suggests Labour will prioritise the former objective over the latter.
In the short-term this seems plausible. Labour must shore up its remaining support even if doing so means moving sharply to the left. In the longer-term, it is a dubious strategy. Labour might think the public secretly yearns for a left-wing alternative to the SNP but May’s Scottish parliament elections seem unlikely to endorse that presumption. On the contrary, the SNP’s success has been based on commanding the centre-ground, which Labour seems determined to abandon to the SNP.
No one advocates a gung-ho approach to fracking. Environmental concerns cannot be dismissed. But the Scottish government’s own expert group last year concluded that those concerns can be addressed and that fracking has potential. Ministers have preferred to avoid a decision, imposing a moratorium instead. Far from taking a gung-ho approach, the Scottish government prefers a go-slow policy of inertia which risks dooming the industry before it has even been established.
The dispute over fracking is a question of politics, not science. Politicians claim to favour an evidence-based approach to policy making only to the extent that evidence reinforces their existing prejudices. Facts may change but minds do not.
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No decision will be made before the election, allowing the Scottish government to avoid the difficulty of disappointing either the pro or anti-fracking interest groups. The SNP specialises in being all things to all people but a decision cannot be avoided for ever. It must either disappoint left-wing environmentalists or those who think Scotland’s energy sector needs all the help it can get.
Unfortunately, the moratorium has had an impact. Glasgow university’s Paul Younger says the delay has “killed any prospects for unconventional gas developments in Scotland for the foreseeable future”. Professor Younger, a member of the expert panel, warns that “The investment (and jobs) will go to England, Poland and other places.”
Scotland needs a balanced energy portfolio in which rival means of production combine to meet the country’s needs in a sustainable and ecologically responsible fashion. Renewables will continue to play a part in this but planning delays and technological obstacles mean offshore wind has yet to live up to its promise. The same difficulties apply to wave and tidal power. With nuclear power off the agenda and coal-fired power belonging to the past, not the future, there seems something quixotic about rejecting — on the basis of prejudice, not evidence — the potential of fracking and other “unconventional” new sources of energy.