LONDON — Britain’s green revolution is coming for oil and gas workers — but a lack of clarity from politicians is leaving them in limbo.
In Westminster, Labour has promised to ditch reliance on fossil fuels in favor of solar farms and wind turbines. That means phasing out environment-wrecking oil and gas drilling in the North Sea — good news for the planet, but deeply unwelcome for the thousands of people who rely on jobs in the industry’s traditional Scottish heartlands.
Worse still, experts say those workers have no idea what is about to hit them.
“The workers in Aberdeen did not think that oil and gas was going to decline,” Emma Pinchbeck, who advises ministers as head of the independent Climate Change Committee, told MPs earlier this year, after a visit to the heart of the drilling industry in north-east Scotland.
“There has been a failure of communication to those workers about the transition that’s coming,” she warned.
Advisers to the devolved government in Edinburgh, which is led by the Scottish National Party (SNP), meanwhile see the same problem ahead.
Workers north of the border are falling through a “communication gap,” said the economist Ann Pettifor, who advises Scotland’s government on energy policy as a member of the Just Transition Commission (JTC.)
Neither ministers nor industry are preparing people who are about to lose their jobs for what’s coming, she warned.
British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that, as jobs linked to fossil fuels decline, the government will train up “a clean power army of engineers, welders and technicians” to slot into new climate-friendly industries springing up around the green transition.
But Labour is struggling to align its policies in London and Edinburgh, and its political opponents are already waiting in the wings, prepared to take full advantage of the confusion.
That includes Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a populist party hoping to land a more attractive offer with these voters: the promise to — like Farage’s hero Donald Trump — drill, baby, drill, until the North Sea’s reserves run dry.
Rude awakening
Labour has pledged to overhaul the U.K. energy system by 2030. At the same time as greenlighting a steady stream of solar farms and turbines, ministers have hiked taxes on fossil fuel developers and banned new drilling licenses in the North Sea.
They insist workers need not fear the resulting whiplash.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises he can avoid a rerun of the mass unemployment seen after the deindustrialization of northern and midlands English towns in the 1970s and ’80s. “I’m never going to allow that to happen under a Labour government,” he said shortly after taking office.
New jobs in clean energy will be filled “using the skills of our North Sea workers … to decarbonize our country,” Miliband told last year’s Labour conference.
But a clutch of Labour politicians in Holyrood publicly back union campaigns to keep issuing new North Sea licenses — opposing a policy central to their colleagues’ green ambitions in Westminster.
And the rebellion goes to the very top. “To put it bluntly, if the choice is more expensive imports from despotic regimes like Russia or new oil and gas, I think the answer has to be new oil and gas,” Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Holyrood, told the New Statesman last month.
Some Labour MPs in Scotland hint, too, at support for more drilling. “When the proposal to drill Rosebank [oil and gas field] goes in, I think we could send a signal over that,” said Torcuil Crichton, MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, referring to a legal judgment threatening the future of the North Sea’s biggest untapped oil and gas field. That signal should show workers “that we are on their side,” he said.
Richard Hardy, who also advises Holyrood as a member of the JTC, said such inconsistent messaging has left oil and gas workers disoriented.
“The constant to-and-fro-ing around new extraction, the Rosebank stuff, the court case,” he said, “the lack of clarity on the government’s position on future extraction … There is a level of uncertainty [for workers] about ‘Well, where do I go now?’”
The North Sea is home to “very, very intelligent and switched-on workers,” said Claire Peden, an organizer at Unite the Union — but “a lot of them don’t believe that it [job losses] is an immediate threat.”
The idea that the industrial switch to net zero could produce jobs just doesn’t resonate with the public, argued Steve Akehurst, director of Persuasion UK, an independent research body.
“Things like jobs and growth and bills — if [ministers] could convincingly land that message about net zero helping with those things, that would be amazing. But it has a bit of a credibility problem with voters. It’s not intuitive,” Akehurst said.
Plenty to go around
The SNP, unsurprisingly, blames the Labour government in London, which it accuses of sowing “confusion” across the industry.
“We were promised that there would be no cliff-edge approach to the energy transition, yet this Labour U.K. government has done little to quell that suspicion. If you don’t have investment then you don’t have jobs, and in the real world outside of Westminster it really is that simple,” said Dave Doogan, SNP energy spokesperson.
A DESNZ spokesperson argued that the government had invested heavily in clean teach in the North Sea, adding: “Through our North Sea consultation, we are in dialogue with North Sea communities — businesses, trade unions, workers, environmental groups and communities — to develop a plan that enables us to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities of the years ahead together.”
All this is against the backdrop of the SNP’s own shifting messaging about drilling off the Scottish coast.
The party pivoted suddenly last year to backing new North Sea licenses, provided developers could pass climate tests, after years of governing with a built-in assumption against new drilling. The SNP’s political opponents claim its position changed yet again earlier this year, a charge the party denies.
Amid all this, the multiplier effect of job losses could be devastating, Hardy said.
“A platform is a small village floating around in the North Sea,” he explained. “You have the production workers. You have the people who support the production workers. You’ve got safety, transport. You have a whole community of people living on that rig.”
Greener jobs can’t fill these gaps, he argued.
“The energy produced by that rig will be produced by a windmill [instead],” he argued, “which employs one person in a control room monitoring the activity of that windmill.”
According to Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), which lobbies on behalf of oil and gas companies, around 120,000 jobs will be affected by the transition. The figure is disputed by some green campaigners who claim the true number is in the tens of thousands.
Parcel-passing
Pettifor, the economist, believes the communications problem is structural.
“You don’t have the communication channels that used to exist,” she said, now that many of Aberdeen’s workers are employed indirectly via agents.
“That means governments have to step in to fill that communications gap. And they haven’t understood how serious the information gap — the communication gap — is, in order to fill it, in order to provide advice to people who are going to lose their jobs.”
In the absence of a clear steer from government, information is left to flow from corporations to employers. And that isn’t happening either, Pettifor said.
“We’re waiting for the private sector to do that. As a result, the communication falls between the cracks.”
OEUK dismissed the claim the industry was not talking to its workers. “Those operating oil and gas assets, and those involved in servicing those assets regularly, actively engage with their staff. So there’s no doubt that staff are well engaged. Contractors are well engaged with their employers,” said Mike Tholen, OEUK’s sustainability and policy director.
The unions, meanwhile, blame Labour.
“They’ve lost the room completely, they’re so out of touch. They’ve built their election campaign on false promises. They’ve now been exposed and been called out,” said Unite’s Peden.
“I just don’t see how they can pull this back in Scotland,” she added.
Reform rush in
Farage, amid this sense of alienation, eyes an opportunity to try and ambush both Labour and the SNP.
Farage, who calls Labour’s net zero policy a “catastrophe,” wants U.K. drillers to extract every last drop from the North Sea.
One leading pollster predicted at the end of last year that Reform could do well enough in Holyrood elections in 2026 they will end up holding the balance of power in Edinburgh.
This is borne out in YouGov polling at the end of March, which placed Reform second in Scotland, behind the SNP but comfortably outpacing Labour and the Conservatives.
Reform’s second-in-command, Richard Tice, said workers are being “completely” caught off guard.
“They’ve been lied to,” he said. “And people get very cross when good, skilled work [and] paid jobs get thrown in the dustbin for no good reason. And they can see that very loud and clear.”
Reform’s electoral strategy in Scotland is, Tice said, to “just keep ramming home this message that you’ve been lied to, you’ve been misinformed, you’ve been misled.”
The Tory opposition sees an opportunity here, too.
“We are taking down oil fields in Scotland because the [net zero] plan does not make sense,” leader Kemi Badenoch told an event in March.
Pinchbeck, the climate watchdog boss, is more optimistic about the future of North Sea jobs — but told MPs that communication with those at the sharp end of the changes needs fixing, and fast.
“Only about one percent of the [oil and gas] workforce are in industries that we cannot see moving over to net zero industries or new opportunities when you look at the U.K. overall,” she said.
“But if you are in Aberdeen, that clearly feels different. There is a real need to have better conversations there.”
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