16:46 Kirsty Blackman (SNP)

I will just mention a couple of other things. Regarding climate change and a just transition, energy prices are going up. The UK Government are putting through the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill to ensure that there is more licensing of oil and gas fields, which will make absolutely no difference to the prices that people pay for their energy. What it will make a difference to is the profits of those energy companies—that is where it will make a positive difference. Those companies will have higher profits if they are able to carry out more exploration and have more fields licensed as a result of those explorations. It takes something like 16 years for a field to come through, so licensing more today will not make any difference to the prices that my constituents are paying for their energy.

The Government are doing these things, making these decisions and making statements about climate change, for example about electric cars, in the face of ever-increasing extreme weather events and ever-increasing climate change. The world is not meeting its climate change targets, and if we ask young people what they are concerned about, we find that it is climate change. They are particularly concerned that our political leaders are refusing to concede that climate change is the most important issue and needs to be tackled. The UK Government need to lead from the front but they are absolutely failing to do so. They should be supporting renewable energy—energies of the future—rather than pouring more time and energy into increasing the amount of fossil fuels that we are getting out of the sea.

It is grim that we end up in this situation and the UK Government can just say, “No, we don’t want to let them have an independence referendum. It doesn’t matter how many people in Scotland want independence; it’s up to us. We are going to make those decisions on behalf of the people of Scotland,” just as they are making so many other decisions on behalf of the people of Scotland. But the decisions that they are making about immigration, human rights and climate change are not being made in the name of the people of Scotland. We need the chance to take that lifeboat to get out of here so that we can make our own decisions—the right decisions for the people who live and work in Scotland—rather having decisions made by the Westminster Government, whoever it is that they are making those decisions for, because they certainly are not making them for the benefit of the general population.

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17:12 Alex Burghart (Conservative)

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) asked for a ray of sunshine, and here I am. There are extraordinary stories to be told from the past 14 years. There are better state schools, as judged by PISA, the programme for international student assessment. We are doing better in international rankings than ever before, thanks to the reforms and investment that we have made. There are better apprenticeships, helping more young people to earn while they learn and move into work. We have the best universities in Europe, sought after by many; record employment, underpinned by an improved welfare system in the form of universal credit; more free childcare than ever before; a national living wage; same-sex marriage; two new aircraft carriers; and the fastest decarbonisation of any major economy. We appreciate that we still have further to go, but emissions are down by more than 50% since their peak in the ’70s.

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