‘It’s Scotland’s oil,’ cried the slogan of the SNP in the 1970s when the party first began a serious drive for Scottish independence. Not according to the current Labour government at Westminster, it isn’t. The oil doesn’t belong to Britain, either, but to the Earth – and that is where it will stay if Ed Miliband has his way.
The bizarre thing is that even Miliband himself seems to accept that Britain will need oil and gas well into the future
Just how devastating current energy policy could end up being for Keir Starmer’s government north of the border is highlighted by a report by the Jobs Foundation, which warns that Aberdeen is facing an economic ‘cliff edge’ as Energy Profits Levy and the refusal to grant licences to develop new fields kills off an industry which made the city wealthy in the 1970s and 1980s. According to a scenario computed by the Robert Gordon University Energy Transition Institute the workforce could fall from 115,000 today to 57,000 by the 2030s – which would mean jobs being lost at the rate of 200 a week. It would be like losing the Grangemouth oil refinery (something which Labour has already achieved) every fortnight. But what about all the ‘green jobs’ which Miliband has promised, and which should be coming to Aberdeen thanks to Great British Energy, which the energy secretary has decided to base there? Forget them. If Great British Energy ever amounts to anything – and there is scant sign so far that it ever will – it has promised just 1,000 jobs in Aberdeen.
The government hasn’t just lost the oil and gas industry; even more worrying from its perspective is that the unions are lined up against it. Louise Gilmour, Scotland Secretary for the GMB, has penned the foreword for the Jobs Foundation report, in which she writes: ‘We will always needs oil and gas. I mean, I don’t like Donald Trump, but he’s right about “drill, baby drill.” We’ve got this whole reserve of oil and gas just off our coast that we should be using.’
The bizarre thing is that even Miliband himself seems to accept that Britain will need oil and gas well into the future. He has demanded a fleet of new gas power stations to keep the lights on when wind and solar are not doing the job. The government has just backed a gas power station on Teesside to be fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. It is just that Miliband seems to want other countries to produce our gas for us, so we can claim to be environmentally pure while other countries do our dirty work for us. You don’t have to be Donald Trump to see the idiocy of this. Trump must be secretly delighted that Britain chooses to buy gas from the US and ship it across the Atlantic expensively in liquefied form rather than continue to exploit our own reserves.
It was possible to argue a case for some level of ‘windfall tax’ on oil and gas in 2022 when the then boss of BP, Bernard Looney, was boasting that his company had become a ‘cash machine’. He sure willed the Energy Profits Levy on his company through that remark. But gas prices have fallen and the windfalls are long gone. But even if gas prices were still sky-high the levy would be killing the industry. According to North Sea operator EnQuest, at one stage it was paying an effective corporation tax of 120 per cent. It doesn’t take much to realise that is unsustainable. Soon there won’t be any licence applications for Miliband to refuse; the industry will have gone. It has come to something when the finance director of oil services group Hunting, Bruce Ferguson, is saying that the company is taking its investment to Nigeria on the grounds that the business environment is ‘more stable’ there.
As for Scotland, Labour’s energy policy is rapidly reforming the country politically into a two-horse race: a revived SNP (which has now shaken off Nicola Sturgeon’s foolish net zero policies) and a rapidly-expanding Reform UK. Labour, which once ruled Scotland as its fiefdom, slipped in December to third in the polls, and there is little sign of a bottom to its ratings.
