Pushing through net zero is bound to create greater trade union and popular resistance

Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery – Grangemouth – is to shut, we learned last week, with the loss of 400 jobs.

The plant – co-owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos – is closing due to the UK’s incoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars to hit net zero targets. The Telegraph has the story.

Grangemouth produces most of the petrol, diesel, heating oil and aviation fuel used in Scotland, Northern England and Northern Ireland. The closure, said Ineos, reflected lower fuel demand given the “ban on new petrol and diesel cars due to come into force”.

While Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, accused Grangemouth’s “billionaire owners” of “industrial vandalism”, she also highlighted the car ban. “The road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs,” said the boss of Britain’s second-biggest union.

Along with Grangemouth, the Government recently confirmed the closure of the last two blast furnaces at the iconic Port Talbot steelworks, resulting in 2,500 more layoffs.

Labour’s green policies are “hollowing out working-class communities”, said Gary Smith, the leader of GMB, Britain’s third-biggest union. The Government, he said, must stop “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation”.

At last week’s Trades Union Congress conference, Unite and GMB highlighted union concerns about the route to “net zero” – a journey Labour is determined to pursue more doggedly than the Tories.

The two unions pushed through a joint motion opposing Labour’s incoming ban on new North Sea drilling licences, championed by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

They want “cast-iron” guarantees for the workers affected – some 30,000 off-shore North Sea oil and gas jobs, plus another 200,000 or so along the UK’s oil and gas supply chain.

Graham evoked the coal mine closures of the 1980s. “Unite will not stand by and watch those workers becoming the miners of our generation,” she said, one of Britain’s most powerful union barons raising the spectre of Thatcher-era industrial relations, marred by chaos and violence, barely two months into the first Labour Government for 14 years.

Attention has lately focused on the row between Downing Street and the Labour Left over the means-testing of pensioners’ winter fuel payments – complaints Downing Street has largely waved away.

But there are signs of a much more substantial, long-term conflict, as the existential industrial cost of the UK’s bid to hit legally binding “net zero carbon emissions” target by 2050 comes into sharper focus.

Grangemouth and Port Talbot are just the latest in a growing list of closures linked to net zero at plants that have long provided decent, well-paid jobs in parts of the country where such jobs are hard to come by.

The destruction of the UK’s North Sea oil and gas operations, and the huge range of related activities, will cause enormous industrial tensions – exposing the chasm between Labour’s relatively wealthy, often urban-based “environmental” voters and its traditional base.

Read the full story here.