Best Of

Regarding North Sea oil...
The fiscal argument is being overstated on both sides.

Yes, the £25bn figure is doing a lot of heroic work. Even OEUK’s own case is cumulative, conditional, and heavily dependent on tax reform and investment actually happening. It is not a magic annual cheque for defence, pensions, potholes etc.

But treating this purely as a Treasury line item misses the Aberdeen point. Even if the Exchequer effect is modest, delayed, or even net negative after tax changes, the local economic effect can still be positive. Jobs, supply chains, engineering skills, harbour activity, household confidence and keeping transition capacity in the north east all matter.

f we are still consuming oil and gas during the transition, there is a strong case for managing domestic production where commercially viable, while using the time and revenue to build the replacement economy in places like Aberdeen rather than leaving them to discover “just transition” means a leaflet and a Job Centre.

Geology wins eventually. But policy decides whether Aberdeen gets a managed landing or another British industrial faceplant.

Aberdeen is heading for a faceplant either way, alas, because the national ability to develop new industries is very close to zero, and all the attention is on legacy industry rather than developing new industries.

We have massive amounts of debate around the oil and gas industry, but there's nothing being said and done about developing a British presence in battery manufacture, or rare earths, or building on some of the promising satellite startups.

At best, many members of our ruling classes genuinely believe engineering and tech is gauche and of less importance than the touchy-feely stuff. At worst, they think it's a threat to the status-quo they benefit from and thus the enemy.

Arguably Makerfield is an excellent result for the Tories. Reason: For the Tories to recover they have to be the main contender Right of Centre, where all polling suggests half the votes go.

This is how it happens: Labour takes support away from the Far Right. The Far Right starts internal feuding. The Tories look respectable and find a few people who look like a government in waiting and suggest some sensible ideas. Votes drift back to the Tories from the Far Right, along with some support from those who have lent their support to Labour. The Tories so position themselves that it is safe to vote for them affirmatively and tactically to keep the Far Right out. (They need to do more on this soon.)

not enough to put them in government but enough to survive and fight another day.

I don't disagree with you but it is maybe also worth pointing out that the Tories' vote share in Makerfield fell from 10.9% to 2.2%, which illustrates the hill they have to climb.

I took the exact opposite message - the old Tory vote has been significantly squeezed here from the GE because we are polarising around Reform/Anti-Reform tactical voting patterns.

Yes. The Tories need to decide, and in not too long, how to frame the next election. Implausibly their single message would be 'We can and will win 325+ seats - Vote Tory'. But their sub text has to be either: Vote Tory as part of the Right of Centre package with Reform; or Vote Tory as part of the Not Reform Tactical Alliance. They can't do both; so their current position - confused - has to shift. The decision is not easy. But they would be assisted in their tactics if they bear in mind two things: Tories are not an entirely amoral shower of chancers even if they look like it; they have lost millions of centre votes for a reason. Finally, the Tories need to remember the great political truth: Only kick a man when he is down.

1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.

2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry.
"I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."

I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.

Come now, the party that has been in charge of British oil and gas for 14 of the last 16 years and is not likely to be in government any where or any time soon has won a by election to defend British oil and gas.
Exciting times for British oil and gas!

I am quite green on environmental issues, but even I can see the sense of extracting the economically useful oil and gas from the North Sea.

It shouldn't stand in the way of our campaign for renewables and electrification which is the obvious future for both energy needs, jobs and security. It makes no sense when doing carbon accounting to merely substitute it with imported oil and gas.

We will need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock etc in the long term too.

We do indeed need fossil fuels for chemical feedstock in the long term, so where is the sense in extracting our reserves and burning them now? It just makes us a future economic hostage to those with bigger reserves. We should be carefully managing our remaining reserves, not burning through them as quickly as possible.

We are decommissioning the infrastructure and the platforms. This is a legal requirement from the government - dismantle and remove.

Starting again from nothing would not be economic.

In that case there is something wrong with the economics. It is just insane to extract and burn a finite resource that will be essential in the future for use as a chemical feedstock.

Billions in infrastructure exist now. It’s not just a hole in sea floor with a rig floating above it.

It is being systematically and expensively removed.

If it is needed again, it will require billions to rebuild.

This is just reality.

I doubt SNP will lose a lot of sleep over Aberdeen South. Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is a more typical constituency for them and they won it easily.

Indeed, there's a risk of taking the wrong lesson from a good result, as happened after Uxbridge.

Everyone, including Starmer and Burnham, concluded that bring the drivers' friend was the way to go, ignoring the detail that Zone 6 is an unusual bit of London. Chasing that vote was one of the signs of Sunak going mad.

Potentially, it's the same here, except eking out oil and gas for a bit longer. Obviously plays well in Aberdeen, not sure about nationwide.

Nobody will bring Aberdeen's glory days back. Geology prevents it even if saving the planet isn't your thing. But it's an emotional thing. People who made a good living out of the oil boom no longer do. Kemi Badenoch is playing the unlikely role of Arthur Scargill in his opposition to an unfeeling Margaret Thatcher towards the miners.

There is 25 billion of tax income from Kemi's policy which we are not receiving due to dogma, whilst at the same time Norway extracts the oil and gas and tax from it's fields around ours

It is not either or but both, maximise tax from extracting oil and gas and continue the transition to net zero

North sea oil and gas exploration will be very much on Burnham's agenda and significantly Wes Streeting is on the same page as Kemi

And fuck the planet.

That is simply nonsense

We are transitioning to net zero but need oil and gas for decades to come

We are minnows in this story compared to US Russia, and others who completely ignore the issue

Cheap energy is a drug. And the North Sea stuff isn’t even cheap. We are addicted to a mindlesslcontinuity that will kill billions while profiting few over the long term.

Global extraction is still rising. It’s a strategic issue. Your approach lacks moral compass.

Watch the NEB

We have to get clean.

1) Kudos first of all to @KnightOut (I think?), whose 160% betting strategy I successfully followed. Other more spectacular wins were available but I liked the safety of this one.

2) My wife has just come in RAGING because she has had to go to my daughter's school to pick up a quiche which my daughter had made because [perfectly good reasons but they don't matter here] only the quiche could not be found. And I understand her frustration of a pointless journey when she was already busy. But the inclusion of the word 'quiche' in the story made it impossible not to laugh. The incongruity of her utter fury and the frequency with which the word 'quiche' was used was highly enjoyable. To make it even better, she has inherited from her mother the quirk of the occasional use of the word 'flan' to mean quiche, which is an even sillier word to say when you are angry.
"I can't believe I've had to spend half an hour of my fucking morning when I was supposed to be working going to fucking ***** ***** School to fetch a fucking quiche which wasn't there. They could not have cared less about the non-existence of the fucking quiche."

This could be pun.

A pastiche quiche unleashed.

Canonically, a quiche is a sub-category of flan. Are you from South of Watford?