NICOLA Sturgeon has acknowledged the next UK Government could be formed by Labour – despite previous SNP claims that Scotland is stuck under Tory rule.
The First Minister backed Labour’s plans to set up a public energy generation company, announced by Sir Keir Starmer, but was put under pressure over a failure to deliver a promised public energy company in Scotland.
Speaking at First Minister’s Questions, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar claimed that “in the face of this economic illiteracy and moral bankruptcy” by the UK Government, “Labour has a plan – a plan for a publicly-owned clean energy generation company and it will be established in the first year of a Labour government”.
He added: “It took the SNP months to back Labour’s proposals for a windfall tax.
“So today, will the First Minister back Labour’s plan for a publicly-owned energy company to bring down bills, to create jobs and deliver energy security?”
The First Minister insisted she was “happy to give support to policies of that nature”.
Mr Sarwar said: “How times have changed from telling Scotland you’re never getting a Labour government again to now giving proposals to the next Labour government.”
He added: “In 2017, the First Minister promised to create a Government-run energy company that would sell Scottish renewable energy to customers at ‘as close to cost price as possible’, using the powers that the Government has. That promise was broken.
“A Labour Government will establish a public energy company in year one. After 15 years of SNP Government, we are told that we still have to wait. This matters.
“In January, the First Minister sold off Scotland’s sea bed on the cheap.
“If we had a publicly owned energy company in Scotland, that sea bed would have been in the hands of the Scottish people; they would have had a stake.
“Instead, we have the ludicrous situation in which Vattenfall, which is a publicly owned company in Sweden, will profit more than taxpayers here will.
“Why is it the First Minister’s priority and policy that our natural resources fund schools, transport and hospitals in Sweden but not those in Scotland?”
But Ms Sturgeon said that “whatever might or might not happen in the rest of the UK, Scotland will not be getting another Labour government any time soon”.
She added that the Scottish Government is “committed to a publicly-owned retail energy company”.despite plans being shelved.
The First Minister said: “Covid, unfortunately, changed those plans.
“We will shortly set out our plans for the national public energy agency.
“However, if Anas Sarwar is going to come here and ask me such questions, surely he must know that to set up a publicly owned generation company would require that this Parliament have powers over the energy market and access to borrowing that we do not have.”
Mr Sarwar pointed to a failure to tally up a pledged number of green jobs as Scotland’s offshore energy industry took off.
He said: “The SNP promised 130,000 green energy jobs, but it failed to deliver.
“We should remember that it promised that we would be the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’. Instead, it is selling off our assets on the cheap.
“This week, the people of Scotland have seen that change is coming with Labour – change with our ambitious plan to freeze energy bills, change to invest in energy security, change to create tens of thousands of high-skilled well-paid jobs here in Scotland and change to get rid of the economically illiterate and morally bankrupt Tory Government.
“Even the First Minister must surely see that those are the changes that Scotland needs.”
But Ms Sturgeon claimed that under her administration, “our net energy consumption is already provided by renewable energy sources”.
She said: “Scotland leads the world when it comes to renewable energy, and ScotWind is a shining example of that.
“In the interests of finding a bit of consensus, I say that I want to see the back of the rotten, corrupt and failing Tory Government, just as much as anybody does.
The First Minister stressed that if the government "is to be replaced at United Kingdom level by a Labour government, surely everybody has a right to hope that that Labour government would be very different to what it would replace.”
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