A major trade union has warned oil and gas workers are being abandoned like coal miners were by the Tories. Louise Gilmour of GMB Scotland made the incendiary comparison days after an oil firm announced the closure of the Mossmorran plant in Fife.
The Labour Government’s tax policies and opposition to new drilling in the North Sea have been blamed for mass job losses in the sector. The oil refinery at Grangemouth closed this year while hundreds of jobs will go when Exxon Mobil walks away from Mossmorran next year.
Speaking to the Record, Gilmour likened the winding down of oil and gas production to more than 200,000 miners losing their jobs between 1980 and 1994. Margaret Thatcher, the Tory Prime Minister during most of that period, waged war on the coal industry in a bid to defeat the trade union representing the miners.
Gilmour accused ministers of failing to learn the lessons of the 1980s while “sleepwalking” into another “industrial catastrophe”. She said: “All the promises of new jobs being made to oil and gas workers today are the same promises made to miners 40 years ago.
“They meant nothing then and, without urgent action, will mean nothing now. A needless, industrial calamity is unfolding right now, today, while ministers talk about jobs tomorrow. The voice of energy workers must be heard and heeded instead of empty words and hollow promises.”
The GMB, one of the biggest unions in the energy sector, is urging chancellor Rachel Reeves to cut the windfall tax faced by oil and gas firms in this week’s Budget. They also want the UK government to greenlight the Rosebank field north of Shetland.
She said: “The need to safeguard this crucial sector could not be more obvious or urgent.
“We will need oil and gas for years as we transition to renewables and we will need the skills and experience of oil and gas workers to make that transition happen.
“The need for an industrial strategy driven by ambition and investment that can build on those skills could not be more urgent.
“We must remember our industrial history or be condemned to repeat it.”
Gilmour also claimed the UK Government’s “rush to renewables” was “sacrificing oil and gas workers”.
It comes after Exxon Mobil chair Paul Greenwood partly blamed UK Government policies for the Mossmorran closure decision.
The company’s ethylene plant in Fife produces the base material for plastics.
Greenwood said there are “four keys to success” – a cheap and abundant supply of ethane, along with low-cost operations, good market prices for ethylene and a skilled workforce.
He said: “I will be blunt – I have one of those keys to success in place, and that is a brilliant workforce.
“Two of those keys I deliberately do not have because of Government policy.
“Take the ethane supply: you know what’s happening in the North Sea, we’ve had windfall taxes, we’ve had a ban on production licences – I need cheap sources of abundant ethane and I do not have them, because the North Sea – because of Government policy – is declining rapidly and that ethane is increasingly high price.
“If I come to the second part, which is I need to operate at low cost, I have to have a burden put upon me of CO2 taxes – we paid £20 million last year in CO2 taxes, that will double in the next four or five years. My international competitors do not have those costs.
“I also have to deal with high energy costs and those kind of things, so these are deliberate Government policies that are undermining us.”
A spokesperson for DESNZ at the UK Government said: “We have taken rapid steps to deliver the next generation of good jobs for North Sea workers in a fair and prosperous transition, including making the biggest investment in offshore wind and carbon capture, helping oil and gas workers access clean energy jobs through our ‘skills passport’, training programmes and our Fair Work Charter.
“Our landmark Clean Energy Jobs plan shows how we can deliver the next generation of skilled jobs across the country, where Scotland could see over 40,000 new jobs by 2030.”
