I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. That is why I was genuinely asking the hon. Member for Angus (Mr Weir) what practical steps Scottish Enterprise will be taking. Many of us have had a slightly cynical or bitter experience of Scottish Enterprise as being great at putting out the initial press release, but when it comes to taking tangible, practical measures to help communities—I do not need to tell my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway or the Minister this—it comes into such situations with great promises but 10 years later everyone is scratching their heads and looking for the diversification it is supposed to have delivered.
I am conscious of the time and the important contributions that will be made by the two Front Benchers. On the other issue I mentioned, Mosmorran plant, which sits just over the border with the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Natural gas is brought ashore at St Fergus, primarily from the Brent field and from the Goldeneye field in the North sea, and is brought down from there in a pipeline that is about 140 miles long—my calculation might be slightly off—to Mossmorran, where it is split. The ethane goes across from the Shell plant to the ExxonMobil part of the plant, where it is heated to 800° so that it can
be cracked, to use the scientific term, and turned into ethylene. Of course, ethylene is a daily part of our lives, as it used in a huge variety of products—perhaps even in the cups we are using today.
That work sustains jobs for more than 200 people, many of whom are my constituents. They will be looking to see that when we talk about long-term sustainability for the oil and gas industry we make sure that those crucial scientific jobs, which are also highly sought after, often by graduates—in both Parliaments we talk so much about encouraging those sorts of jobs—are protected. We need to see genuine substantive steps to do that for the sake of our constituents and their families. I hope that the two Governments will set point scoring aside and get on with standing up for all of our communities, whether they be in Aberdeen, Glasgow, my own area of Fife or across the border.
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