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ZACK Polanski just threw down the gauntlet to Andy Burnham: No new oil and gas.
No ifs, no buts. In particular, the Green leader wants the Prime Minister to rule out approval for Rosebank and Jackdaw, oil and gas fields off the Scottish coast.
Whether he meant to or not, Polanski was also challenging the SNP, whose environmental policy is now panned by campaigners as “more extreme” than Donald “drill, baby, drill” Trump.
Polanski didn’t challenge John Swinney explicitly and, as a member of the Greater London Assembly and leader of a party which doesn’t contest Scottish elections, can’t challenge him directly.
But the politics of his press conference on Wednesday were clear and the message simple: If you care about the environment, vote Green.
The other parties will say this is unfair. But it is a message that has particular resonance throughout the UK this summer, with much of England and all of Wales in the middle of a drought, while wildfires rage from the Cairngorms to Suffolk.
Swinney made a calculation that the “middle Scotland” voters he needed to keep onside to win last month’s Holyrood election probably were a wee bit concerned about the environment but not so much so that the party had to take strident positions on reserved policy matters like energy that risked alienating other parts of the electorate.
In Aberdeen, the SNP’s “presumption against” oil and gas was as appealing as glugging down a pint of Brent crude.
Despite being a phrase attached to a proposal for a consultation in a draft policy document – the caveats are practically endless – these two words were quickly picked up as proof positive that the SNP were dead against oil and gas .
This was an image problem that probably cost the party one of its Westminster seats when Aberdeen South fell to the Tories in June.
So Swinney felt he had to act.
Sure enough, the party that once called Scotland a “world leader” on climate policy was now calling for the windfall tax on oil and gas giants to be scrapped – just as those companies were posting some of their highest profits in recent years.
The shift has not escaped the notice of Nicola Sturgeon, who at the SNP’s 2019 conference said the party recognised the reality of the “climate emergency”.
In a new foreword to her memoirs, the former first minister said Swinney was “lucky” the Greens did not field more candidates at the May election because she reckoned the SNP could have lost more seats than they did.
She said that the SNP would be foolish to “soften its left-of-centre environmentalist credentials”.
But as far as the Scottish Greens are concerned, that is exactly what they’ve done. Lorna Slater, the party’s former co-leader, told the Sunday National last month that the party was ditching the “very progressive vision” set out by Sturgeon – and losing votes to the Greens .
The Scottish Greens were in the unusual position of getting a bit of a bounce off of the fortunes of their English counterparts earlier in the year, but it’s unclear whether the more lukewarm reception Polanski is now getting after a couple of recent, high-profile missteps is reflecting on them similarly.
Polanski might also have made his climate-focused announcement with one eye on the polls, after recent surveys found that his popularity has taken a knock.
What is obvious, to Polanski, the Scottish Greens and perhaps soon for the SNP, is that as wildfires and droughts become the reality for millions of people across the UK, the environment is moving ever upwards in people’s list of priorities.
