Orkney SNP candidate Robert Leslie has used a speech at his party conference to highlight the ‘utter madness’ and ‘massive inequity’ that forces some Orkney households to turn off their electric heating and instead burn candles under upturned flowerpots or use imported gas bottles instead of ‘local’ electricity.
Mr Leslie was supporting a call to the UK Government to devolve energy powers to Scotland and noting that remote control of Scottish energy from Westminster has been a complete failure.
Speaking on Monday afternoon, supporting the resolution from Kevin Stewart MSP and fellow islander Alasdair Allan MSP, who represents the Western Isles, Mr Leslie talked about the massive increase in demand for energy support that he had witnessed during the energy crisis of 2021-22, alongside significant rationing of electricity due to cost.
And he recalled how he had been making a similar case 10 years ago.
“In 2015 I was a first-time speaker here on an Orkney resolution calling for the energy inequity households relying on electric heating faced. My case was eloquently supported by another first-time speaker that day, Kate Forbes.”
Kate Forbes, now Deputy First Minister, also spoke in her own address to conference on Monday afternoon about the damage that energy control from Westminster has done to Scotland.
Contrasting Scotland with the energy wealth Norway had built from its oil, estimated at $2 trillion – allowing them to weather economic instability – Ms Forbes told conference:
“We can’t unpick the past as much as we would like to, but we can write a better future, one where we will never tolerate fuel poverty in an energy-rich nation like ours, and we can only do that with independence.”
Mr Leslie observed:
“Our careers have taken slightly different paths, but we both await a UK Government that has the political will to resolve the glaring inequity where folk on electric heat pay four times more for a unit than folk on gas.”
This meant, he said, that electricity in energy-rich Orkney was often heavily rationed.
“Despite our islands having generated more clean, green electricity than we consume every year since 2013, I have visited a house where a candle was being burned under an upturned ceramic flowerpot propped up on wood to provide heat. The electric storage heating was switched off. Other houses burn imported gas bottles because the local electricity is so expensive.
“This is utter madness, a massive inequity, and needs to end.”
Speaking of his role providing energy support and advice over the past 15 years, Mr Leslie highlighted how demand had increased from a total of 131 contacts with 73 households in 2017, to 418 contacts with 152 households in 2024. He said that in 2024 one house had needed 28 individual interventions before it got the right meter.
“This is Britain’s broken private energy system – it breaks people, makes them physically and mentally ill as they sit in cold, damp homes. I went through counselling last winter as the work of supporting folk with complex, time-consuming engagement with energy suppliers and not being able to sort issues quickly was impacting on my own mental health,” he said.
Mr Leslie said that it didn’t have to be like this though and spoke about how the Canadian province of Quebec had taken private electricity generating and supply companies into public ownership in the 1960s.
A talk given to Orkney Renewable Energy Forum by former Hydro Quebec employee Patrick Goulet had highlighted how taking energy into public ownership had brought benefits of equality of price – no matter where you live in the province – stability, and ability to invest.
“Fuel poverty in the province is 7%. Imagine if Scotland could emulate Quebec,” Mr Leslie told the conference.
“Meanwhile UK Labour refuses to implement a recommendation of its own Climate Change Committee to cut electricity prices by 19% by removing levies from electricity bills. High prices are blocking decarbonisation.
“But folk on electric heat in Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles and across rural Scotland have long-since decarbonised. We are punished instead of being rewarded. We urgently need these powers to create energy fairness,” he concluded.
The resolution, which noted that Scotland’s energy wealth has long been squandered by the UK Treasury, while people in Scotland pay some of the highest bills in Europe, was passed with no opposition at the conference, which was held at The Event Complex Aberdeen over three days from Saturday to Monday.
The elections to the Scottish Parliament take place on 7 May 2026.
You can watch Robert Leslie’s speech here:
