AN SNP MSP and former cabinet secretary had to be admonished in the Holyrood chamber by his own sister after he attacked the Scottish Greens as “wine-bar revolutionaries”.
Fergus Ewing used the phrase, coined by editors at the Scottish Daily Mail, to attack his party’s allies at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday.
Ewing, a former rural economy secretary, said that ending oil and gas exploration in the North Sea was a form of “economic masochism advocated by the wine-bar revolutionaries in the Green party” that would make climate change “worse”.
His comments were cheered by the Conservative benches, but led to a call for “courtesy and respect” from deputy presiding officer Annabelle Ewing – his sister.
First Minister Humza Yousaf quipped afterwards: “I’ve got a feeling, deputy presiding officer, that’s not the first time you’ve had to tell off your brother, one suspects.”
Addressing the substance of Ewing’s question – in which he suggested that cutting North Sea oil and gas development would only leave the country more reliant on oil and gas imports and worsen the climate impact – Yousaf said that “nobody” in the Scottish Government or Green party was saying fossil fuel extraction had to stop “tomorrow”.
“They understand that a just transition means that we have to take the workers of the North East with us,” the SNP leader went on.
“What I would say is that independent research based on industry projections found that production in the North Sea will be about a third of 2019 levels by 2035.
“So it is a declining base, hence why we have to make sure that we are accelerating that just transition.
“Meanwhile, as of 2019, only 16% of the oil and gas coming into Scotland, including imports from Norway and beyond, is consumed in Scotland.
“So reducing our energy consumption, while ramping up our energy generation capabilities through renewables, through hydrogen, will mean that a net-zero Scotland will not only be less reliant on importing oil and gas, but hopefully be a net exporter of cleaner and greener energy to the rest of the UK and beyond.”
Ewing’s attack on the Scottish Greens as “wine-bar revolutionaries” came after a furious attack he launched on the party in the pages of the Scottish Daily Mail early in April.
The MSP, the son of psuedo-legendary SNP figure Winnie Ewing, claimed the Greens were “fringe extremists”, branding them “wine-bar pseudo-intellectuals whose fingernails have never encountered dirt”.
In the headline, the Scottish Daily Mail editors coined the term “wine-bar revolutionaries”.
Speaking after FMQs, Maggie Chapman said: “We are in a climate emergency and we need all governments to act like it. Yet, even as the world is burning, Westminster is doubling down on fossil fuels and proposing even more oil and gas extraction.
“As the UN Secretary General has said, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once. That must mean ending all new oil and gas exploration and shifting subsidies and support from fossil fuels to a just energy transition.
“The Scottish Government must remain steadfast in its commitment to a presumption against any new oil and gas exploration. Whether it’s Rosebank today or other proposals to drill tomorrow, we need to stop the climate vandalism and end our dependence on fossil fuels.”
