Letter from Edinburgh: Scotland’s oil balancing act

The recent blow to plans for developing the Cambo oilfield illustrates the country’s changing and increasingly uneasy relationship with oil

Scotland’s governing Scottish National Party (SNP) has changed its position on oil and gas significantly in recent years. As recently as the run-up to the independence referendum of 2014, the SNP supported maximum recovery from the North Sea, and its economic arguments for breaking away from the UK centred heavily on oil and gas resources in Scottish waters. This marked a continuation of an argument the party had been making for decades, with the slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’ first used in election campaigning in the 1970s. However, the referendum—which saw Scots voting 55pc to 45pc to remain in the UK—coincided with crude prices starting to fall. The volatility of oil prices in the subsequen