Ed Miliband is teeing Labour up for yet another Scottish pummelling

Telegraph

2 days ago

It would come as too great a shock to the Government to admit that Donald Trump is right and Ed Miliband wrong. But it's true anyway, at least in terms of the recognition by the US president of the massive national resource that the North Sea's oil and gas fields are to the UK. This is a recognition that the Labour Energy Secretary seems to be resisting.
Miliband has presided over a calamitous decline in the number of jobs in the North Sea in the year since his party regained power at the 2024 general election. More than 13,000 jobs – about 37 every day – have gone, even as the Government chooses to stand firm on its commitment not to grant any new oil and gas exploration licences in the North Sea and our dependence on foreign energy supplies grows.
According to the Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) trade association, 57,200 out of a total of 117,900 jobs, both directly and in the broader supply chain, were lost in the decade after 2013.
In almost any other industry, such devastation for families and the economy would have been marked by protest marches, a Government lobbying campaign and at least a handful of folk songs. But oil workers are not miners, even if their industry looks to be heading the same way.
Preventing the issuing of new exploration licences might please the small number of teenagers and bored pensioners who have the time and energy to throw soup around art galleries and close off main thoroughfares as part of their campaign against oil, but it has also led to a significant dependence on foreign imported oil and gas – 47 per cent of our total energy needs in the first quarter of this year, according to Miliband's own department. That's nearly ten per cent higher than in 2019.
It threatens to be a vicious economic cycle: fewer domestic jobs in the North Sea oil sector means less tax revenue for the Treasury, while increased imports of oil and gas risk Britain's carbon emissions targets because of the very act of transporting it across the globe.
Never was the temptation for a department – or a cabinet minister – to virtue signal their green credentials greater, even at the risk of losing high-skilled, well-paid jobs in a sector that has proved indispensable to Scotland and the wider country in the last 50 years.
The chief political problem for Miliband and his officials – and indeed the entire political class – is that the real narrative about climate change, if told honestly, is not one that would prove popular with voters.
Reducing our carbon footprint was always going to be expensive and painful. So in order to sweeten that pill, politicians of all parties started talking about a 'just transition'. This essentially means the replacement of old jobs that are dependent on oil with new, shiny jobs that are carried out by smiling university graduates with hard hats standing in fields full of windmills.
The reality, however, is that that transition will not be as smooth or as painless as our political leaders want it to be. The modern job market is not subject to the whims of governments, except at the margins, and the transition, as amply shown by the job loss figures in the last decade, will be messy and painful.
Yet the pretence is seen as necessary, otherwise voters simply won't vote for parties that support saving the planet, and so the greater good must be prioritised over short-term goals like employment and prosperity.
Miliband could ameliorate the damage done to the North Sea jobs market by easing up on his ideological opposition to new drilling licences. During his recent visit to Scotland, president Trump described the North Sea as a 'treasure chest', but observed also that the Government 'have essentially told drillers and oil companies that 'we don't want you'.'
This is evidently true. So long as the Government maintains its North Sea windfall tax on the industry, refuses to grant new drilling licences and depends on increasing volumes of foreign oil imports, there is very little for the industry, and the individuals and families that rely upon it, to look forward to.
With the imminent winding down of the Grangemouth oil refinery and the loss of hundreds of jobs there – the site is to be converted to an import terminal for finished fuel – Scotland is set to be hit hardest by this Government's energy strategy. And Scottish voters may well severely punish Labour in the next election: could 2029 be another 2015?
Historically, Labour in office has frequently found ways of compromising its high-minded socialist principles if that was what was necessary for defending the livelihoods for working people.
Such compromises were swiftly condemned by those on the party's Left. Now we have a cabinet minister who, in another age, would have been one of those critics. If a new, imaginative and economically serious path is to be charted out of the industrial vandalism currently being wrought on the North Sea, a new Energy Secretary might have to lead the way.