It wasn’t long ago that Nigel Farage seemed a hopeless sell in Scotland. In 2013, on his way to campaign in a by-election in Aberdeen, he didn’t get further than Edinburgh’s Royal Mile before he had to be escorted from a pub by police for his own safety. Ukip, which he then led, had a derisory presence north of the border – even when it was making in-roads into working class areas in the North of England.
The destruction of North Sea oil and gas is very big deal for Scotland, especially in Aberdeen where Farage was campaigning yesterday
What has changed to make Reform UK, Farage’s current party, serious contenders for the Hamilton by-election this week? There is a big clue to be found in a report by Robert Gordon University this morning which points out that the much-vaunted ‘green jobs’ in the wind industry are being created at only half the rate that jobs are being lost in oil and gas. By 2030, it predicts, 29,000 jobs could be created in offshore wind while 58,000 may be lost in North Sea oil and gas – many of them as a direct result of the government’s refusal to issue new licences for oil and gas. Also because of the ‘windfall’ tax on the sector (bringing total tax on oil and gas companies, including corporation tax, to 78 per cent) even when oil and gas prices have fallen back and there are no longer any windfalls to be had.
The destruction of North Sea oil and gas is very big deal for Scotland, especially in Aberdeen where Farage was campaigning yesterday. In London, Ed Miliband might get away with making out that fossil fuels are a kind of heritage industry which has little relevance to the economy of the future. He is not going to impress many people in Scotland where North Sea oil and gas still accounts for 6.6 per cent of the economy and employs one in 15 of the working population. If Scots were going to be convinced by the merits of a rapid switch from fossil fuels to renewables they would need to see a massive boom in jobs in the latter. And, much though Miliband tries to convince us otherwise, it simply isn’t happening.
Government figures try to make out there is big growth in the ‘net zero economy’, but when I prodded the methodology back in February the researchers behind it refused to tell me which companies they had counted as part of the ‘net zero economy’ on the basis that it was ‘proprietary data’. But from what I could make out it included any company involved in running the national grid – as if we wouldn’t have an electricity grid were it not for our net zero target.
The Robert Gordon study tells a story which is closer to the experience of many Scots. Not only is the North Sea oil and gas industry being destroyed by government policy, Scotland has just lost its only oil refinery, at Grangemouth, which is to be repurposed as a much small import-only terminal.
But if you live in Scotland how do you express your displeasure at how net zero is destroying jobs? Not by voting Labour, obviously. And not by voting SNP either. Back in 2013 when Farage was chased off the streets of Edinburgh, the SNP was led by Alex Salmond, a great advocate of the oil industry. Indeed, his whole case for independence was based around a windfall which he said would accrue from taking control of ‘Scotland’s Oil’. How things changed under Nicola Sturgeon, and have continued to change since. Now, the Scottish government tries to outdo Westminster on net zero.
Until recently, Farage was treated as fruitcake for taking up the cause of countering net zero. It’s not like Brexit, we were told – net zero is just a marginal issue of interest to a few people on the right. Until, that is, the unions started to protest about the jobs being lost as a result. People used to say the same about Brexit, of course: it was only a marginal issue of interest only to people on the right – until 52 per cent of the population voted for it. If Reform UK triumphs in Hamilton on Thursday, it will be obvious that the political establishment has made a very, very big miscalculation on public support for net zero policies. It is an issue which has the potential to carry Farage to No. 10.
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