The SNP's confused message on oil and gas has already cost votes

If May’s Holyrood election had caused the SNP to slip back into complacency, the Aberdeen South by-election held just six weeks later might have brought them back down to Earth.

Indeed, the headline result in the Scottish Parliament election hid some hard truths for the ruling party. Yes, they were still ahead – and comfortably so – of all other opposition parties nationally but in local contests across the country, things were much closer.

Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine, won by the SNP’s charismatic former Westminster group leader Stephen Flynn, is one such close contest. Flynn held the seat for the SNP with a reduced share of the vote and a majority of just 1,244 votes (or 3.6 per cent), with Tory MSP Liam Kerr close behind him. In fact, it could fairly be argued that it was Reform winning over 6,000 votes here in May which scuppered Kerr’s chances of winning.

Still, with Flynn elected to the Scottish Parliament he was forced to resign his Westminster seat. That situation came about after MSPs voted through a rule change last year, the campaign for which Flynn ironically became the face of after initially controversially saying he intended to hold onto both jobs (a position he later backtracked on, admitting he had “got it wrong”).

Aberdeen South on the face of it appeared to be more favourable to the SNP than the Holyrood near-equivalent. It includes part of Holyrood’s Aberdeen Central constituency, which was won convincingly by the SNP’s Jack Middleton, a former Scottish Government Special Adviser, while excluding some of the more Conservative-friendly areas to the south of the city.

Even so, the Conservatives spotted an opportunity to win their first Westminster by-election in Scotland for over 50 years. And they threw everything at it. Leader Kemi Badenoch was deployed to the constituency four times, while candidate Douglas Lumdsden – who had only just been re-elected as a North-East MSP – was barely seen in Edinburgh. The party’s strategy was to home in on one issue that matters a great deal to Aberdonians: oil and gas.

Under Badenoch, the Conservative Party has continued its shift away from the consensus around net zero. Energy security had already been pushed up the agenda by the unrest in Ukraine and the Middle East, and under pressure from Reform UK, Badenoch began pushing the UK Government to “maximise” extraction from the North Sea while dubbing net zero targets “impossible”. That was a stark contrast on what had gone before. Even in 2023, when then prime minister Rishi Sunak granted 100 new licences for North Sea drilling, he claimed this was “entirely consistent” with net zero commitments – yet now Badenoch dubs those same commitments “ideologically driven”.

For a city whose success has been so enmeshed with the oil and gas industry for decades, such calls proved seductive. Lumsden not only won the seat but doubled the Conservatives’ share of the vote from the 2024 election and came very close to winning an outright majority of votes cast (49.5 per cent).

Lumsden himself admits the result came as a bit of a surprise. The party had tried to keep expectations in check, telling those on the doorstep that the result would be close between them and the SNP. But with most media attention focused elsewhere – the Makerfield by-election was scheduled for the same day – the Conservatives were able to turn this vote into a “referendum on oil and gas”, the new MP says.

The success of this strategy registered with Flynn. The SNP’s support slumped massively, delivering its worst result for the constituency since before the independence referendum. In a social media post, the MSP (and economy secretary) wrote: “A tough night in Aberdeen that some will need to reflect on, quite heavily.” There is no doubt that the “some” he refers to are those within his own party who are more sceptical of continued drilling.

“There were some issues with how we communicated our policy on oil and gas,” acknowledged Pete Wishart, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster, at a recent summer reception hosted by Holyrood when asked about the result. He commended the Tories for successfully keeping their messaging focused – but he also highlighted that the SNP won the night’s other by-election in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, and had just secured a fifth successive term in government.

But his diagnosis of the problem in Aberdeen South is correct: the SNP’s position on oil and gas is, at best, unclear.

The draft energy strategy published in early 2023 included a “presumption against new exploration for oil and gas”. However, over three years on a final version has not been     published. While ministers have repeatedly blamed the delay on the UK Government – Flynn accused it of having an “incoherent” position on the windfall tax, while former energy secretary Gillian Martin had said she was “taking sufficient time” to consider UK-wide decisions and court cases – there is clearly also an element of not wanting to nail their colours to the mast. Rolling back its previous position would clearly be welcomed by some, but the SNP also knows doing so might risk alienating others.

That said, there have been signals the government intends to move away from the presumption against exploration – or at least softening its stance. First Minister John Swinney has repeatedly spoken about not opposing licences that pass a “climate compatibility test”, whereby the negatives are outweighed by any positives that would come from using domestic supply over imports.

And earlier this month, Jack Middleton – who until being elected was an adviser to Swinney – and SNP MP Kirsty Blackman signed an open letter written by the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce asking the UK Government to approve two major North Sea developments, Jackdaw and Rosebank. Both had been approved by the previous Conservative government, but those licences were deemed unlawful after a court challenge over the failure to include lifetime emissions in the environmental impact assessment.

Adura, the joint venture between Shell and Equinor which owns platforms at both developments, published its updated impact assessment for Jackdaw nearly three weeks ago. It said that over the course of its lifetime, the oil field would account for less than 0.02 per cent of annual global greenhouse gases. That is still up to 35.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions or equivalent, and climate campaigners say that existing developments will already push global warming beyond 1.5 degrees.

While Middleton and Blackman’s support for the exploration was described as breaking ranks with the SNP’s policy in the press, it is also a reflection of their local interests. But Swinney knows there is a careful balance to be struck, not least because while the Conservatives’ by-election victory tells one side of the story, the other is in the central belt where the SNP lost swathes of votes to the Scottish Greens. There is a danger in that appearing to deprioritise climate change, the SNP risks losing a much greater proportion of votes.

Perhaps this is why Swinney opted not to leave energy policy in the climate action brief with Martin, nor hand it to Flynn as part of the economy, but instead bundle it together unusually with external affairs and hand it to Stephen Gethins – who reports directly to the first minister.

In theory, the Scottish Government’s stance on oil and gas exploration doesn’t matter all that much. It is a reserved policy area, and one on which Labour had a clear stance. As climate secretary, Ed Miliband did not grant any new licences since coming into office, as promised in the party’s manifesto. And in the King’s Speech delivered in May this year, an Energy Independence Bill was promised to support the transition away from fossil fuels and permanently ban new exploration licences.

As with much of his policy agenda, where new Prime Minister Andy Burnham stands remains unclear. The new energy secretary is Miatta Fahnbulleh, who worked under and is a close ally of Miliband, and who once posted on social media that “we can’t have any new oil or gas fields”. However, last week she spoke about “pragmatism” and Burnham has spoken at length about needing to reindustrialise parts of the UK. There are hopes that this would extend to the north east, where one in six workers are employed in or support the offshore energy sector.

Writing in Holyrood’s sister publication The House shortly after the Aberdeen by-election, Conservative shadow Scottish Secretary and shadow energy minister Andrew Bowie argued: “Since Miliband took over as energy secretary, the country has lost 1,000 jobs a month in the sector, and few places have been as heavily impacted as Aberdeen South. You can feel it walking along the streets in the constituency. Empty houses, for sale signs, and businesses shutting down. The by-election result was a resounding rejection of Miliband’s devastating energy policies and a vote for the Conservative Party’s pledge to get Britain drilling.”

But even without needing to commit to the ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda supported by Bowie and his party, there is an argument that more needs to be done to insulate the area from job losses. As the Scottish Affairs Committee warned last year, the oil and gas industry’s decline is outstripping jobs created by newer, cleaner sectors. MPs called on the UK Government to “avoid accelerating the decline of North Sea oil and gas production through its policy environment”.

And where the Scottish Government eventually lands on this will matter, because while ministers are not responsible for these policies, the administration does share responsibility for delivering the just transition towards net zero. If it comes down on the side of more drilling, that will only increase pressure on the UK Government to allow it. But if it stays firm with its presumption against policy, that could give Burnham and his government the justification needed to stick to Labour’s manifesto commitment.

Either way, time is ticking for the SNP’s deliberately muddled message on the sector. Tough decisions are on the horizon, and ones that could very well shape the future of the party. The growing split on the matter could very well grow into a bigger issue for Swinney – especially with an ambitious Flynn waiting in the wings to take over.