How North Sea union leaders' 'No Ban Without a Plan' campaign is starting to work

A campaign by the Unite union has flushed out SNP and Labour MSPs who believe there must be discernible plan in place for job replacement before the run-down of North Sea oil and gas

Back in May 2023, Labour hung an albatross round its own neck by briefing a Sunday newspaper, out of the blue, that it would ban further exploration in the North Sea. Nuance came later.

Political messages tend to be interpreted in shorthand and the effect of that exercise was to position Labour as an ‘anti-North Sea’ party. The fact the SNP had got there first, to mollify the Greens, provided only partial cover.

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My own reaction was that the policy was an ill-advised hostage to various fortunes. The means of intimating it were worse. Whichever bright young thing provided the briefing gave little thought to how it would be received by people whose livelihoods depended on the North Sea.

Instead, there were grand assurances about the green jobs a transition to “net zero” will bring. To which, not unreasonably, the widespread response was: “Show us the evidence.” It would be generous to say the jury is out on when and whether this will be available on anything like the scale required.

North Sea oil and gas workers must see a genuinely just transition to a net-zero economy (Picture: Andy Buchanan/WPA pool)North Sea oil and gas workers must see a genuinely just transition to a net-zero economy (Picture: Andy Buchanan/WPA pool)
North Sea oil and gas workers must see a genuinely just transition to a net-zero economy (Picture: Andy Buchanan/WPA pool) | Getty Images

Common sense to prevail?

The unfortunate effect of the May 2023 declaration was that it turned a sensible, progressive, Labour commitment to speeding up the energy transition into a policy encumbrance. Defining the North Sea as a problem rather than an ally was a piece of virtue-signalling which had not been thought through.

This week, in evidence to a Commons committee, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, said he did not want to see net zero turned into a “culture war issue” by the likes of Nigel Farage and Liz Truss, a sentiment with which no sensible person would disagree. In retrospect, Mr Miliband might accept that the original message helped create unhelpful polarisation.

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He assured the committee that the offshore industry and government now share “common ground” on the future role of oil and gas and that there is soon to be a consultation on the government’s North Sea licensing policy. The former may be optimistic but the latter offers a welcome opportunity for common sense to prevail.

Mr Miliband confided in the committee that “the truth is that new licences to explore new fields are a relatively marginal part of the future prospects for the North Sea”. Eureka! That is true but it does beg the question of why it was briefed as such a big deal, provoking consternation, negativity and even the fulminations of Donald Trump?

Arguing over 2 per cent

At this point, I revert without apology (since I have quoted them here before) to the words of Chris Stark, when he was leading the Climate Change Committee and who is now the Labour government’s “head of mission control for clean power 2030”, unless they have recently found him a crisper title.

A year ago, Mr Stark told a Holyrood committee: “We know that we will need gas until 2045. We see that, without new licences, there will be a 97 per cent reduction in North Sea gas production by 2050. With new licences, that reduction will be 95 per cent.

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“That difference between 95 and 97 is not the issue, but those two percentage points have dominated the political discussion of climate for two whole years. My biggest concern is that that has crowded out the discussion about how to get off the stuff in the first place.”

Labour needs to get itself off that hook and if a consultation is the mechanism, please get on with it. As long as we need oil and, even more so, gas, it will be difficult to persuade anyone that it is fine to import but not to produce, thereby keeping people in jobs instead of forcing them to the four corners of the globe to work offshore, as is happening.

Norway’s example

The SNP blurred its own “no new licences” mantra to save a few North-East seats at the general election but retains a hostile “presumption” against North Sea developments. This is one occasion on which the nationalists might look to Norway which continues to licence, explore and produce oil and gas – while seeing absolutely no contradiction with its own drive for net zero.

We need honesty about the immense challenges involved in delivering the increase in renewables generation which would make the 2030 clean-power target plausible. These are not due to malign intent but reflect the scale and complexity of the task. We need grid connections. We need storage. We need infrastructure. We need hardware, preferably produced in this country, in order to turn objectives into outcomes.

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All of these are resistant to a fixed timetable and it’s idle to pretend otherwise. What matters more is a firm direction of travel. That also needs the UK and Scottish governments to work together in common cause, rather than running a contest for who occupies the higher moral ground.

A genuinely just transition

The “No Ban Without a Plan” campaign by the trade union, Unite, has flushed out both SNP and Labour MSPs who support the basic premise that there has to be a discernible plan in place for job replacement before proceeding with the run-down of North Sea oil and gas. That is what ‘transition’ should mean.

However, the clinching argument lies in energy security. In the longer-run, all of the technologies which the Labour government is rightly committed to support can provide this but in the meantime, there is every reason to maintain the capacity that already exists – just as we should have done with nuclear 20 years ago. If we had done that, we wouldn’t need gas for baseload!

I notice Messrs Mlliband and Stark are due to make a joint appearance before a House of Lords Committee next week. Perhaps that refined setting will encourage unanimity to emerge, that it is time to move on from “the difference between 95 and 97” to the challenges of learning from history and securing a genuinely just transition.

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