Ann: UK Southern Gas Basin - Operational Update, page-109

Good synopsis and excellent points. This is the lobbying & grassroots efforts needed by industry that I was alluding to some time back. The focus not so much on trying solely to change the vacuous, wrongheaded minds of the party’s energy policymakers at this late stage or to win the intellectual debate, but on ensuring Labour does not win one single marginal seat in Scotland, and that the party’s focus groups and internal polling consistently shows this right up until polling day.

Industry can play quite a big and interfering role here, and do so quite transparently too when alongside the unions, in decimating Labour’s remaining Scottish support. Starmer is not completely stupid, and if he sees the extent to which voters and their extended families are angry and affected, it still could result in some last minute modification and concessions. It is all about seats, and while I congratulate the industry body for engaging constructively - and for little guys like HHR to be participating in forum discussions and penning logical thinkpieces too - it is firing up the voters on the ground that is necessary. Now too - it cannot wait until the closing stage of the campaign. The Scots are great and tenacious fighters, going to battle is hardwired into them.

The sheer irony of the Labour party doing this to the working man & woman, but that’s a whole other discussion and probably not for here!

(All imo of course!)