IF there's one thing you can rely on the Scottish Conservatives for, it's working themselves up into a lather of indignation about the Scottish Government, even, or perhaps especially, when the issue under discusson is one which is reserved to Westminster.
Thus it was with rookie Tory list MSP and erstwhile coalition partner with Labour on Aberdeen council Douglas Lumsden, who accused the First Minister of "turning her back" on the people of the North East of Scotland after she said that the controversial Cambo oil and gas field off the west coast of Shetland should not be given the go-ahead given the imperative to move away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources in order to combat climate change.
In response to a question from Labour's Monica Lennon, the First Minister said: "I don't think we can go on extracting new oil and gas forever, that’s why we’ve moved away from the policy of maximum economic recovery and I don't think we can go and continue to give the go-ahead to new oil fields. So, I don't think Cambo should get the green light."
The Scottish Government has no control over the issuing of oil and gas licences in Scottish waters, this was a power that Westminster reserved to itself when the devolution settlement was being established. It is entirely a decision for the Conservative Government of Boris Johnson whether Cambo goes ahead or not, and as we've seen on numerous previous occasions, this is not a British Government which bothers itself with the views of the Scottish Government when it comes to decision-making.
As Douglas Lumsden knows full well, the opinions of the Scottish First Minister or indeed the interests of the people of the North East of Scotland have absolutely no influence on the decision that the British Government will finally make. Douglas has just unwittingly highlighted another reason for Scottish independence, just as the Aberdeen Tories unwittingly proved that Unionist parties cannot be trusted when they did a deal with Labour to keep control of Aberdeen council.
What the response of the Scottish Conservatives to the First Minister's statement proves is that they will not even let the threat of climate change and its potentially catastrophic effects on the futures of countless millions of people get between them and an SNPbad point.
It shows that they are not a party which takes the most important threat to the future of humanity seriously and that fundamentally they are a frivolous, trivial and infantile party, which is appropriate since their vision for Scotland is as a frivolous tartan add-on to Great Britishness, which is to be kept politically trivial and infantilised.
Lumsden has a nerve. The real way in which the people of the North East of Scotland had a government turn its back on them was when the Conservatives decided not to go ahead with the carbon-capture initiative at the Aberdeenshire Acorn project.
The extraction and use of fossil fuels must inevitably end, but by refusing to fund a major carbon-capture project in the North East, the Conservatives are ensuring that as oil and gas jobs come to an end, workers in the North East will end up on the scrap heap just as the Tories dumped thousands of workers in Scottish traditional industries on the economic scrap heap in the late 1970s and the 1980s.
I don't recall Douglas Lumsden speaking out against the Conservatives' decision not to fund the Acorn Project, proving that he's far more interested in petty political point-scoring than he is in standing up for the interests of the North East of Scotland.
The Scottish Government is focused on creating a just transition to a zero-carbon economy for those currently involved in the oil and gas sector. That's not a task which is made any easier by the actions of the British Government.
This piece is an extract from today's REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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