Scotland’s energy sector takes a back seat to a Bedfordshire roller coaster

If you ever find yourself looking for a masterclass in political sleight of hand, look no further than HM Treasury.

For decades, Scottish industry has been treated to Westminster’s favourite parlour game: Offer a big pile of cash for a promised investment, wait for voters to look away, and then whisk it into the back pocket of the Whitehall exchequer.

The latest victim of this dreary Westminster game is the Acorn Carbon Capture and Storage (CCUS) project at St Fergus in Aberdeenshire – a cornerstone of Scotland’s net-zero transition and a vital lifeline for thousands of skilled jobs.

In the small print of Andy Burnham’s first Budget, he and John Healey have tried to sneak out this betrayal of Scotland’s energy sector. The £200 million grant for Acorn – pledged by Ed Miliband with great pomp and circumstance only last year – has been quietly put through the shredder.

In its place? A patronising offer of “loans or equity investment”, effectively dumping the financial risk back onto Scotland while pulling the rug out from underneath our industrial transition.

To add insult to injury, Labour ministers spent the following morning tying their forked tongues in knots on live radio – first claiming the grant funding remained intact, only for news outlets to reveal that the £200 million grant had been degraded into repayable debt.

This is not a mere “communications failure”; it is a deliberate, political choice to choke off Scottish industry.

To pretend this is just a single misstep by a fresh-faced Labour administration would be far too generous.

The story of carbon capture in Scotland reads like a tragicomedy where the punchline is always the same: Scotland gets the bill, while England gets the building work.

• In 2005, Gordon Brown dangled a ground-breaking CCUS plant for Peterhead, only to quietly mothball it.
• In 2014, Scots were sternly warned by the anti-independence campaign that staying with Westminster was the only way to guarantee world-class green energy infrastructure.
• In 2015, David Cameron torched a £1 billion CCS competition just days before the COP21 Paris climate summit.
• In 2021, Boris Johnson snubbed the “shovel-ready” Scottish Cluster, pushing Acorn to “reserve status” while pumping multi-billion-pound backing south of the border.
• In 2024, Sir Keir Starmer confirmed a colossal £21.7 billion for CCS networks in Teesside and Merseyside.
• Finally in 2026, Labour finalised the sting – scrapping public grant money for Acorn altogether to carve out a tidy £200 million saving.

As Seamus Logan, local SNP MP for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, aptly put it: “The Labour Government comes to Scotland, takes our resources and gives nothing back – our energy story is one of betrayal, abuse and outright lies.”

What makes this industrial vandalism so glaringly unjust is the sheer scale of the double standard across the border.

While Scottish energy projects are expected to get by on IOUs, and weasely warm words, the Westminster Treasury is handing out billions in cash to English developments.

Labour has committed £9.4 billion to prioritising English CCUS sites in Teesside and Merseyside. When English steelworks faltered, Westminster found the appetite to nationalise them

Yet when Scottish plants, facilities, and supply chains face hardship, Westminster suddenly rediscovers the rigid doctrine of the free market.

Indeed, Labour’s economic strategy for Scotland resembles an inverted Robin Hood: Rob from the resource-rich North to fund vanity projects in the South.

While key industries in Scotland – Grangemouth, Mossmorran, and the turbine manufacturing supply chain in Inverness – are starved of backing, the Westminster government can comfortably announce £1.3 billion to support infrastructure for a theme park in Bedfordshire.

Apparently, rollercoasters in the Home Counties rank higher on Andy Burnham’s priority list than green jobs, energy security, and industrial decarbonisation in Scotland.

As SNP Energy spokesperson Graham Leadbitter MP noted: “By choking off public funding in favour of English sites they have made a political choice to actively damage Scotland’s industrial base and ruin our just transition. This whole mess has left the industry and the project in the lurch.”

Acorn is not an isolated casualty; it is part of a pattern. From the closure of Grangemouth to the wind-down at Mossmorran and the struggles of renewable supply chains in Inverness, Labour’s, promises to Scottish workers have vanished quicker than fruit pastilles in a nursery.

Westminster treats Scotland’s vast natural wealth – our oil, our gas, our wind, and our carbon storage potential – like a regional cash cow to be milked when needed, while returning little more than the opportunity to receive a monthly credit card demand.

Expecting a Westminster government – whether Tory or Labour – to really care about the economic future of Scottish communities is like hiring a falcon to guard a dovecot and being surprised when all that’s left is a pile of feathers.

The lesson of the Budget could not be clearer if it were carved into the side of Edinburgh Castle and filled in with luminous paint. So long as key decisions about our energy, our infrastructure, and our industrial base are made in the corridors of Whitehall, Scotland will always be treated as an afterthought.

Scotland is a nation blessed with huge renewable potential, world-class engineering expertise, and vast carbon storage capacity, yet we are tethered to a broken Westminster system which starves our industries to bankroll theme parks and English steelworks.

This latest act of industrial sabotage is not just a policy blunder – it is a damning indictment of Westminster control. It demonstrates beyond doubt that Labour, like the Tories before them, cannot be trusted with Scotland’s economic future.

The solution does not lie in holding out  for slightly better loan terms from Westminster. The only way to protect our jobs, build a true green economy, and secure our energy wealth is to put our hands on the steering wheel ourselves.

To truly flourish, Scotland must be an independent country.