SNP politician needs to learn how to make constructive suggestions, not just party political jibes
Jack Middleton came up a reasonable idea to help the North East economy, then immediately undercut it with a jibe at Westminster
According to Aberdeen Central MSP Jack Middleton, the UK government should ringfence tax revenues from the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields to support renewable projects in Scotland. Given the jobs being lost and the talk of a “just transition” for energy workers, there’s a reasonable argument to be made for at least some of the money raised, if the two fields are given the go-ahead, to be used in this way.
Unfortunately, Middleton, an SNP politician, simply couldn’t resist throwing in a jibe at the dreaded Westminster, saying the funds were necessary to “curb the number of immoral job losses that lie on the doorstep of Number 10”.
Whether or not there’s any truth to this, if you’re trying to persuade another party’s politicians to do something, insulting them is never going to help. And Labour may now feel that if they did take this step, they’d be tacitly admitting they were to blame.
It makes what could have been a constructive suggestion seem more like party politics, designed not to help the people of the North East, but the SNP. How disappointing.
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