STEPHEN DAISLEY: Ill-served workers  of Grangemouth will feel abandoned by Labour and the SNP... where is THEIR just transition?

Theres a meme I’m particularly fond of that sees a US comedian shoot his co-star then turn to camera, deeply upset, and ask why someone else made him do it.

The image popped into my head last week as I watched one politician after another line up to wring their hands over Grangemouth.

On Thursday, Petroineos announced the closure of its refinery with 400 workers facing redundancy. 

Asked about it at First Minister’s Questions, John Swinney pledged to ‘support the workers of Grangemouth in their time of need’ and said that it was ‘important parliament acts with solidarity’.

Scottish Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Baillie called it ‘a time of great anxiety’ but assured Holyrood that ‘the UK Labour Government is ready to support the workforce and secure a viable, long-term future for the site’.

The owners of Grangemouth, Petroineos, have announced the refinery will close next year with the loss of around 400 jobs

They say in politics you can’t be all things to all people, but in presenting themselves as defenders of oil and gas workers while clamouring for the end of the oil and gas industry, the SNP and Labour are giving it a fair old try.

And, of course, offering their ‘solidarity’.

That word fell out of fashion for a while during the cool, carefree me-me-me 1990s, but it seems to have made a comeback of late.

I don’t mind hearing it from old Lefties, the wizened class warriors who still wear donkey jackets, sup pints in draughty working men’s clubs, and toddle about with a well-thumbed copy of the Morning Star under their arms.

Striking

They belong to a time when the word meant something because it involved doing something, like organising a whip-round for the families of striking miners or steelworkers.

But when used by politicians today the term grates on my ears, not only because it involves a very middle-class profession trying to feign common cause with the working class, but because ‘solidarity’ is a term now used to signal political sentiments entirely at odds with political actions.

Stick a clenched fist in the air every now and then and you can do what you like to the workers.

Of all the towering cant inspired by the announcement, none can scale the heights of Gillian Mackay, a Green MSP who grew up next to the refinery. 

She denounced it as a ‘brutal blow’, which would leave workers and locals ‘devastated, angry and extremely worried’.

It was ‘the opposite of the just transition’ and Grangemouth workers ‘deserve so much better’. It was ‘urgent’ Westminster and Holyrood ‘work together to secure local jobs’.

Local SNP MSP Michelle Thomson has revealed she has been approached by a mystery company which wants to take over the refinery

Wait till she reads what someone posted on her Twitter account in 2016: ‘Living beside INEOS I’ve pointed this out to people so many times. I’d much rather have a wind farm than an oil refinery on my doorstep.’

If you want to gauge the sincerity of politicians’ statements about Grangemouth, all you need do is ask what they did over Rosebank. In 2023, the North Sea Transition Authority gave development and production consent for Rosebank, a field off the north-west coast of Shetland and thought to be the largest untapped oil resource in the UK.

In response, then SNP leader Humza Yousaf accused the UK Government of ‘climate denial’. The Scottish Greens’ climate spokesman Mark Ruskell called it ‘an utter catastrophe for our climate and the worst possible choice at the worst possible time’.

As for Labour’s position, you might want to make sure you’re sitting comfortably. This could take some time.

When the Rosebank licence was granted, Labour had already announced that if elected it would reject all oil and gas licence applications in the North Sea. On the day of the Rosebank decision, Sir Keir Starmer told LBC that ‘as a matter of principle’ – no sniggering, please – Labour would ‘accept the baseline that we inherit from the government’. So Rosebank would go ahead.

Asked if Labour’s position had changed in light of the Supreme Court’s Horse Hill judgment – which ruled in June that approval of an oil well in Surrey was unlawful – Angela Rayner said ‘licences that have already been approved will carry on,’ before adding cryptically: ‘If there’s a decision to be made at the time, then that will come to that secretary of state to make that decision.’

So, naturally, Labour won the election and decided it wouldn’t oppose a legal challenge brought against Rosebank by the anti-fossil fuel lobby.

Yet Scottish Secretary Ian Murray says we shouldn’t link this to net zero. 

The refinery ‘has been losing a lot of money’, he points out, and Petroineos simply made a ‘commercial decision’ to shut the site. Petroineos tell a different story. 

While acknowledging the cost of upkeep on a half-century old refinery, chief executive Frank Damey says ‘the energy transition is happening now and it is happening here’, citing the drop in demand for fossil fuels and ‘a ban on new petrol and diesel cars due to come into force within the next decade’.

Who is right? It’s a dispute we don’t have to settle because the significance of the Grangemouth closure is the same. This is what it looks like when the fossil fuel industry shuts down.

In the 1980s, the more callous Thatcherites, confronted with redundancies in mining, would dismiss the industry as ‘uneconomic’. It was, of course, but that didn’t make the social damage caused by its decline any less severe.

Once-solid communities came undone amid a toxic medley of unemployment, drugs, crime and family breakdown.

The reason the ‘just transition’ is called that is because its proponents wanted to reassure oil and gas workers, and those employed in industry supply chains, that there would be no repeat.

Essential

The move from carbon to clean energy would be gradual, managed and with the welfare of the workers and local economies a leading priority.

There is no standing in the way of progress. The development of carbon neutral energy sources is essential for a liveable world, opens up a panoply of business opportunities and can help us fortify our energy security.

But if ‘just transition’ means anything beyond a soundbite, meeting the challenges of the future must not mean abandoning people in the present.

Yet the Grangemouth workforce has every reason to feel abandoned, for it has been ill-served by Petroineos, the Scottish and the UK governments. The latter two have come forward with a ‘£100million package’ for the workers and community, but this is cynical spin.

What Holyrood and Whitehall have come up with since Thursday is £20million between them. They got the £100million figure by counting the £80million capital funding allocated to Falkirk and Grangemouth under the pre-existing growth deal.

Now, that other £80million will undoubtedly benefit the local community, to the tune of more than £600million and more than 1,600 jobs in the next 30 years according to the government, but for the Grangemouth workers much of the benefit will come after the fact.

Acting SNP Energey Secretary Gillian Martin said says she has no idea who the company is reported to want to buy the Grangemouth site

It won’t save their jobs, though it might help them find new ones or retrain for different careers. This is the wrong way around. If it’s a just transition you’re after, you have to put the investment in long before jobs are at risk.

The support is needed in enough time to help the industry shift gradually from fossil-centred jobs to careers built around green energy, striking a balance that gets you to net zero but avoids large-scale redundancies and devastating social and economic damage.

Grangemouth ought to have been the model for what a ‘just transition’ looks like. Then again, maybe it is.