Donald Trump is right. Britain’s refusal to “drill, baby drill” in the North Sea is crazy. Halting exploration just as global energy security unravels is an act of national self-sabotage. [some emphasis, links added]
But it’s more than that. As we throw North Sea oil workers onto the scrapheap and condemn a community that once kept the lights on in Britain to post-industrial oblivion, some see parallels with the closure of Britain’s mines.
As in the 1980s, industrial communities face annihilation, but this time, not for rational reasons of economics.
Starmer’s party, for all its talk of standing up for working people, is devastating working-class communities in the name of its “progressive” green agenda.
While Trump castigated Ed Miliband on social media for halting exploration in the North Sea “treasure chest”, I was in Aberdeen, the industry’s epicentre, staring at a ghost dock.
The signs of decline in the city’s port are stark. A generation ago, it would have been throbbing with activity, ships coming in and out.
But today there is just the sound of birds and waves. The one oil ship I tracked coming in with my marine app had not been supporting exploration for new resources, but ferrying supplies to an existing rig.
True, the South Harbour is gleaming from its £420m transformation into an offshore wind farm and logistics centre. But there seemed to be a distinct lack of workers on the vast concrete lump, which is now supposed to serve as a wind-component assembly line.
On the horizon, I glimpsed a lime-green vessel bringing offshore wind workers home – considerably smaller than the floating villages that used to hold hundreds of oil workers, as well as doctors, chefs, and cleaners.
In the poor neighbouring community of Torry, I strolled through the only park, which will soon be razed to make way for a new “Energy Transition Zone”. I suppose one should laugh: green spaces are being sacrificed in the name of net zero.
But I was struck by an even bigger irony. According to local trade unionists, Labour’s accelerated move away from North Sea oil eerily mirrors Margaret Thatcher’s mission to speed up the closure of the mines in the 1980s.
In his office, draped with old silk trade union banners, Unite’s lead industrial officer for the oil and gas sector in Scotland, Bob MacGregor, told me:
“We keep repeating history. When the mines shut, it was devastating for communities. By allowing all the jobs to go with none to replace them, the past is coming full circle. Ed Miliband has to go.”
Although New Labour made peace with Margaret Thatcher, perhaps even understanding the economic logic of closing the mines, for the party’s rank and file, the miners’ strike of 1984-85 – the Great Strike – remains the Tories’ great, unforgivable crime against the workers. So it is a strange twist that Labour has come to embody everything it claims to loathe.
At one point, the North Sea pumped out more oil than Venezuela, but the industry’s Scottish heartland now seems depressed, and not just because of the decline of oil and gas extraction itself.
From the nearby ports that pick up spillover business to the fabrication yards dotting the countryside, a host of enterprises linked to the sector are fighting for survival. …
Labour argues that green jobs will replace oil jobs. But while oil rigs employ hundreds, offshore wind platforms require minimal staffing.
Far from reskilling people for the green era, in Aberdeen, former oil workers are scratching a living as supermarket assistants, while those with the skills in the hottest global demand – from divers to extraction specialists – move abroad.
Labour’s attack on today’s workers is far more difficult to forgive than Thatcher’s war on the miners.
By the time of the Great Strike, the mining industry was already on life support, and the pits needed massive state subsidies just to stay in business. In contrast, the North Sea offered productive, well-paid jobs and still contributes billions to the Treasury.
Top: Aberdeen, Scotland, offshore wind farm. Photo by Ben Jackson via Pexels.
Read full post at The Telegraph
