How Reform's hostility to net zero puts a million jobs and the North East's future at risk – Mercedes Villalba
Andy Burnham can turn Scotland’s North East into a clean energy powerhouse, creating good jobs to replace those being lost in the oil and gas sector
Andy Burnham may just be the spark the North East of Scotland has been waiting for. His pledge to devolve greater powers to places undergoing industrial transition, including Aberdeen, is the right one. But who has a voice in determining how those powers are used, and whose interests they serve, matter greatly.
In recent months, many on the political right have sold more North Sea drilling as the cure for our region’s problems – a prescription shaped more by politics than reality. These voices are thoroughly invested in maintaining the status quo and are already seeking to undermine the positive change that Labour has started and that Burnham needs to turbocharge.
Whether it’s the Conservatives and Reform taking pages from the Trump playbook, or the SNP’s abject failure to make plans for a just transition, none of them truly face up to the reality the North East faces.
READ MORE: The big mistakes Andy Burnham must avoid in his first 20 days as Prime Minister – Brian Wilson
Tories’ failings over jobs
It is clear from the recent Aberdeen South by-election that people are ready for change. However, the Conservatives’ plan does not stand up to scrutiny. Despite the last Tory government consenting to hundreds of new drilling licences for oil companies over the last decade, jobs in the region continued to disappear. Furthermore, that oil is sold on international markets, meaning more drilling does nothing to reduce energy bills.
Last week we saw the new Aberdeen South MP take his place in a sweltering Westminster. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, he wasted no time in calling for more North Sea drilling, as temperature records were broken and the country’s services buckled in the heatwave, from school closures to record ambulance call-outs and cancelled trains.
Witnessing parliamentarians clamour for more fossil fuels, while mopping their brows in extreme heat driven by climate change, would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. The huge Rosebank oil field would emit more than six times Scotland’s annual emissions, a terrifying amount of climate pollution, for which we would be responsible and from which we are not immune.
Standing up for Scotland’s energy workers is critical, but the jobs Rosebank’s developers say it will create would go no way to solving the problems facing the North East. We need thousands more unionised jobs created in this region, and ones that will last for at least a generation.
It is yet more compelling evidence that some, particularly on the political right, have failed to grasp the magnitude of the challenges we face and, as a result, have no solutions beyond more of the same. Which is to say, sit back and allow our energy policy to be shaped by large oil and gas firms. These are companies that will cut jobs and close industrial sites like Grangemouth at the drop of a hat, to suit themselves.
READ MORE: Why investors are flocking to the energy powerhouse that is Scotland – Will Gardiner, Drax
How to get economic growth
The only credible response to the years of decline we’ve seen under previous Conservative governments is a proper government-backed transition to clean power that makes the North East the beating heart of that change.
The signs are that Burnham grasps this – that places like Aberdeen require a markedly different approach to what’s gone before. “If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as energy,” he said recently. Combine this with his principle of “maximum devolution” and the consequent transfer of power, resources and personnel, and we could see the foundation for real economic renewal.
The North East desperately needs leaders with the ambition, vision and clear mission to create unionised jobs – and one who is prepared to listen to workers, trade unions, and the communities they support, not just industry lobbyists.
It is clear to us where the growth is in our economy and where it will be in the future. The CBI recently highlighted that net zero is worth more than £10 billion to the Scottish economy, the equivalent of more than 100,000 jobs. These are the jobs that will sustain families and communities in the future, and it’s vital that as many of them as possible are created in the North East.
But as Burnham knows, they do not appear by magic; they grow from proper investment and industrial planning. The woeful inability of the Conservatives and the SNP to have properly delivered this has been the biggest threat facing Aberdeen – risking a repeat of the hollowing out of mining communities under Margaret Thatcher.
Reform’s head-in-the-sand politics
Much is made of the ‘self-harm’ of reducing drilling to cut climate emissions, but the greater injury is inflicted by pretending that a fair and managed transition to clean energy is not the most pressing issue facing the North East.
At the extreme end of this ‘head-in-the-sand’ politics is Nigel Farage: recent research shows that Reform’s opposition to net zero could cost the UK a million jobs in areas such as renewable energy – jobs the North East can ill afford to lose.
Burnham’s recent remarks suggest he’s minded to plot a different course from those on the right of our politics – and indeed, Donald Trump – and continue building on the clean energy mission.
The fledgling agency of Great British Energy can create the unionised jobs that more drilling will never be able to deliver, with the added benefit that renewable energy can actually bring down costs for families and businesses by pushing volatile gas off the system. It can go further than this, building clean energy projects owned by communities so that they, not multinationals, profit from the energy generated.
This is the kind of powerhouse the North East can become, but it will take genuine leadership and new ambition to achieve it.
Mercedes Villalba is a former Scottish Labour MSP for North East Scotland
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