COP26 in Glasgow now seems so long ago. It didn’t deliver much. But one pledge to be welcomed and committed to by both Scottish and UK Governments was for a ‘just transition’.

That is described as job security in industries that will play the biggest part in the transition. That clearly applies to the offshore oil and gas sector, where although new fields have been committed to, there’s a recognition that it’s limited and temporary. The future is renewables.

So all should be well, you would think, for workers in the North Sea moving now or in the future from being employed in the oil and gas fields to working in the offshore wind sector. They can simply move over into the new fields, especially as their large corporate employers shift their investment from the old to the new resource.

But, disgracefully, there is no ‘just transition’ for them as rights that apply onshore and in the oil and gas sector are denied them in the new sector. Yet from the shores of East Lothian, we can already see the developments in the Firth. As our communities are being denied cash windfalls from the offshore source, our workers face exploitation and abuse.

Outwith the 12-mile UK territorial waters, there is a legislative gap and yet most turbines will be that distance or more from land. I have written about the disgraceful situation in a windfarm where the energy is landing in East Lothian, yet where UK seafarers were laid off and replaced by cheap labour from South Asia. That happened as minimum wage laws don’t apply.

Now a tragedy which saw a seafarer lost 98 miles from Aberdeen shows that health and safety also doesn’t apply in many aspects. HSE don’t have jurisdiction. Instead, it’s the responsibility of the country where the ship is registered. In this case, as it will be in many others, that’s Liberia.

Our country should be getting the wealth of this resource and our workers should have the same rights that applied in oil and gas.