DOMINIC LAWSON: What a farce! Labour is happy to import oil from Norway's side of the North Sea - while banning drilling on ours

Daily Mail​

25-05-2025

Donald Trump, as is his (uncontrollable) wont, has sent an urgent memo to the British Government, not privately, but through his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Last Thursday he posted: 'Our negotiated deal with the UK is working out well. I strongly recommend to them, however, that in order to get their Energy Costs down, they stop with the costly and unsightly windmills, and incentivise modernized drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken.'
At first glance this is mystifying. Donald Trump is President of the United States. And the effect of Ed Miliband's preposterous policy of banning all new exploration drilling in the North Sea will be to make this country much more reliant in future on gas expensively liquefied and shipped across the Atlantic from US producers. Why would an American President mind that?
But a further line in Trump's post gave the reason for the President's urging of the British Government to boost our North Sea oil and gas business: 'A century of drilling left, with Aberdeen as the hub.'
You see, Trump's family business has a 1,400-acre plot just north of Aberdeen, which is being turned into highly remunerative golf courses. The first one was inaugurated in 2012, and this summer a second will open, on the shores of the North Sea, named the MacLeod Course in honour of Trump's late Scottish mother, Mary Anne MacLeod.
A booming North Sea oil and gas industry means a booming Aberdeen, the best possible news for membership numbers at Trump's Aberdeenshire golf courses. As always with Trump, his family's personal welfare is the highest consideration, even ahead of the interests of the US.
But, in this case, what is in Trump's interests is also in the interests of the UK as a whole – not just of Aberdeenshire. For the British Government's persecution of the North Sea oil and gas business is a scandalous betrayal of what had been the most productive of all our industries, a mounting risk to our own energy security, and of no benefit whatsoever in its claimed purpose – to 'fight climate change'.
On the other side of the North Sea median line, Norway is ramping up business: according to the Norwegian Shelf Directorate, it plans to boost its North Sea exploration and production 'to the highest level since 2010'.
Here's the bizarre thing: in the eyes of the British Government, and the all-powerful Climate Change Committee, if we use oil or gas from the Norwegian side of the North Sea's Continental Shelf, it does not count against our 'carbon budget'.
It is the same nonsense that says the emissions of wood burned at the Drax power station don't count as 'ours' because the forests from which they have been extracted are on the other side of the Atlantic.
Only one other government took the same perverse line with its oil and gas resources as Labour in this country. That was New Zealand, which under Jacinda Ardern in 2018 instituted a ban on drilling in the country's subsea reservoirs of gas, on the grounds that 'the world has moved on from fossil fuels'.
Er, no, it hasn't – and won't. Currently, 75 per cent of global energy demand is met by oil and gas – and here in the UK 80 per cent of our homes are heated by gas.
While Labour is planning 'a tripling of wind power capacity', that is not the same as output, because of the intermittent nature of that energy source. We will still require gas in volume to keep the lights on and industry ticking over when the wind isn't blowing and – in respect of Miliband's rush to turn agricultural land into solar farms – when the sun isn't shining.
Anyway, last week the National Party government in New Zealand scrapped the oil and gas exploration moratorium imposed by the previous PM. The new government's resources minister, Shane Jones, said Ms Ardern's policy had been disastrous, with the New Zealand national grid warning that the country was at risk of blackouts because renewables had not been generating sufficient power during cold snaps.
A Briton, Sean Rush, who runs an energy consultancy in New Zealand, told the Daily Telegraph: 'The UK Government should take notice of what happens when exploration is stifled.
'Investment flees, gas-dependent businesses close and electricity prices soar. It is an economy-killing climate policy.'
The British Government's line is that our own punitively high industrial energy prices – four times those in the US – are entirely down to the rising cost of gas, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
Last week this self-serving explanation was taken apart in a report – The True Affordability of Net Zero – by the founder of the energy consultancy Watt-Logic, the brilliant Kathryn Porter.
Her analysis is that while the spike in gas prices in 2022 (which has now abated) cost UK consumers around £75billion, had this country continued with gas-fired power stations rather than replace any of that with renewables, since 2006, British consumers would have been approximately £220billion better off.
Also last week I was invited to attend an unusual meeting, a sort of call to action, organised by Brindex – the association of British Independent Oil Exploration companies. It was unusual in being also attended by representatives of the GMB Union, which acts for thousands of workers in the North Sea oil and gas industry.
The general secretary of the GMB, Gary Smith, made matters clear from his side: 'In a moment when the North Sea transition is being measured in redundancies, the Government must draw breath. Tens of thousands of jobs directly supported by North Sea oil and gas hinge on these decisions.'
Yet, because of the Government's determination to persist with the Energy Profits Levy, a supposed windfall tax that still operates two years after the Ukraine war gas spike abated, a number of the British-owned North Sea oil companies face an effective tax rate of above 100 per cent.
Nicholas Pogson, of Nobel Upstream, told the meeting that he had written to Ed Miliband about this and had received no response at all, not even from an official. Nobel has now launched a judicial review of the North Sea Transition Authority (sole shareholder, E. Miliband), over its failure to apply the longstanding legal duty to maximise economic recovery of oil and gas in the UK.
Another head of a UK North Sea oil company, Francesco Mazzagatti of Viaro Energy, told me after the meeting: 'This isn't just about economics – it's about energy security and national sovereignty. By gradually undermining its own gas production, the UK is forced to rely on imports from Qatar or the US. This is not a policy, it's a gamble.'
In this context, Ed Miliband is like one of those punters in Donald Trump's former casino operations, putting all his money on red at the roulette table. Only it's our money, not his.
And 'Red Ed' is not just strangling our entrepreneurial oil and gas companies; he's also replacing skilled labour in the North Sea with Chinese-made solar panels.
And all to make our energy less secure. What a farce.