The market won’t save us: workers must lead the energy transition

Britain is paying the price for leaving energy security to private profit. It’s time workers and their unions set the agenda for a fair transition, says MATT KERR

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THERE’S A rumble in the house. Some sort of fan is whirring and before long comes the ticking of expanding steel.

We admitted defeat earlier this week and the heating came back to life. The little blue flame flickered through a tiny window in a tin can in the cupboard. When we owned it, it was wonderful gas.

Wondrous enough to wean the country off of coal fires 50 years ago. The dash for gas started at home, then to the electricity grid, but a fresh transition is now upon us and it will soon be time to move on. But not quite yet.

The task of rebuilding this house has taken six years so far. Electric surprises and plumbing shocks have been the little staging posts along the way. On moving in, I’d made it my mission to remove the old city gas pipe that ran up the hall wall. Eventually.

Dating from the days when houses used to burn gas from coal as well as coal itself, these steel pipes had become obsolete when North Sea gas came on stream back in the day, and most sensible people just covered them up or ignored them over the last few decades.

It had been there for about a century and would not let go without a fight. It took a week and half the wall. “What the f*** happened here?” said the plasterer, agog as I explained. “Aff yer heid.” Hard to argue after the fact.

It was launched into the back garden where it stank for a few days. The benzene-rich aroma probably shortened my life a bit, and was enough for it to be made abundantly clear that it would not in fact “come in handy” and would not be granted settled status in the shed.

It was time for the great scrappy on the Clyde. Unceremoniously folding it into the back of the motor, I begin its eulogy.

The conversion from city gas to natural gas took a decade, the entire country transitioning between 1966 and 1976. It was planned at every turn, from the sale of appliances in your British Gas showroom, to the pipes in streets and homes — even if the old ones were sometimes left behind.

That seems an almost unimaginable undertaking to those of us who have had it drummed into our minds by every government since that the state is merely a bit player; a self-fulfilling heresy that has left it incapable of gritting the roads by itself never mind delivering a something of the magnitude of a wholesale energy transition.

And yet, it happened. Owned, planned and delivered from seabed to cooker. Wonderfuel indeed.

It took 10 years. As of now, it has so far taken 12 years for the Glasgow School of Art to fail to be rebuilt — Notre Dame was rebuilt in five.

We are now decades into knowing we need to transition out of fossil fuels.

For years political leaders dined out on falling emissions, while pointing the accusing finger at a rapidly industrialising China.

If it has occurred to anyone involved that this may have more to do with Britain giving up on manufacturing and attacking organised labour than any great leap forward in our way of living, they’re not for letting on — too convenient to pretend the market is delivering the change and point the finger at the baddy.

Over the next four years, China has pledged to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 17 per cent. Will it do it? We have no crystal ball, but I would be reluctant to bet against a country which has a state and knows how to use it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has done his best to live up to his name and turn the taps on at the Jackdaw gas field. Many unions welcomed the move on the basis it can buy time for a plan to be built to deliver a transition that works for the thousands of families dependent on the North Sea for a living as well as the climate.

There will even be — around five decades too late — a fund formed from the revenue it will generate to invest in low-carbon technology and renewables.

There is an argument for this if it does finally lead to some sort of a plan, but this is one bet I’m not yet for taking.

It may well buy time for workers, but more accurately it buys time for a political class that has so far manifestly failed them; a political class that persists with the idea that energy “security” can be somehow offshored to Shell and Equinor — a concept as ludicrous as handing over the armed forces to Capita. If any MPs are reading, the latter does not constitute a policy suggestion.

Despite their protests, private enterprise is neither patriotic nor charitable — it exists to make a profit.

It will deliver security if it makes the oil and gas giants a few billion more along the way, and won’t if it doesn’t.

The cost of the gas you probably use to heat your home has shot up by over 40 per cent since 2022 while the cost of tapping it in North Sea — whether it be British or Norwegian waters — has barely moved. I’d wager not many workers in the sector saw their wages increase by two fifths in that time.

Energy security is the sickest of jokes when it delivers a surety of supply at prices few can actually afford, that cripples the economy, that leaves 11 per cent of UK households in fuel poverty and needlessly kills thousands of people each and every year.

This marriage to the market literally kills, and not indiscriminately either; pensioners, people with long-term illness, and people living with disabilities — as if being hammered through cuts to support and questions on their right to life wasn’t bad enough.

Of course, even amongst those groups, the chips do not fall equally — the closest thing to security in energy or in health remains a healthy personal bank balance.

If the selective slaughter of our neighbours here and now isn’t enough to prompt a questioning of market wisdom, know that it is utterly incapable of delivering the pace of change needed to buy us a future.

The scrappy announces its presence on the Renfrew Road with a mountain of twisted metal, every part of it once honed by countless hands. The stuff of rusted industry now looks down with envy into the King George V dock, where the pristine white wind turbine blades sit stacked.

Every one of them has travelled a thousand miles to get their rest in Govan, before they make their journey to a hillside near you.

We don’t make them because it was easier for someone just to write a cheque, than to plan and prime that and the many industries like it that could have been giving workers a good living at every step of the way.

The malaise runs so deep we can’t even claim to have written the cheque, but still we have prime ministers and first ministers spouting nonsense about “our oil,” “our gas,” “our wind.”

They lie. And worse, they choose the lie over action needed to offer the promise of a future better than the past.

In place of governments without a clue much less a plan for a swift, fair and orderly transition, it must be for workers to formulate their own.

The days of nudging big oil and gas with an offer of a few sweeties to do the right thing are over.

Workers’ ideas, experience, knowhow, drawn through their trade unions’ must now set the agenda.

Dare governments to own their power.

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