ENERGY security has made a comeback, but sadly not the willingness to actually deliver it.

The concept is of course not exactly an earth-shattering idea, I remember shamelessly pilfering the NUM line on energy security arguing to keep pits open with pals at school in the early ’90s.

By then British Gas, BP and BritOil has all been flogged off for a song by Thatcher’s government, though even as she scrapped the British national Oil Corporation and she understood the need to hang on to a “Golden Share” in BritOil, until the miracle of the market saw oil prices plummet, at least.

Thirty years on, the coal fires I remember have all but disappeared as the “dash for gas” in the ’90s brought us gas electricity plants and contractors made small fortunes fitting combi boilers in pensioners’ homes across the land at the government’s expense, while Gordon Brown made sure the pensioners could fire them up with winter fuel payments.

Not much attention was paid then when the interconnectors with Europe were built to import electricity and gas to a land potentially awash in both. Ownership didn’t matter any more, the cuddly companies would do their best for us, and when they fell short there was a regulator ready to step in. Brown even acknowledged the blatant looting of privatised utilities with a windfall tax executives who had pocketed millions in the previous decade barely noticed, accepting it in the way any other career criminal might accept a short stint inside before resuming business.

Years ago, I sat for a while on a trust set up in the 19th century to offer financial assistance to “indigent widows” in Glasgow. By the 21st century most referrals came from the city’s social work department as they did whatever they could to support those in need, but the cash still came from income from capital left to the fund all those years earlier. Each year we’d get a report from the lawyers who managed the fund on how investments were going and how much they advised to disburse in the year ahead. 

The report in 2013 sticks in the memory. The then leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband, announced that the next Labour government would freeze energy prices and bring in a price cap. The lawyer raised this as a “risk” in his report, and in unusually openly political language described the policy as a “mindless” act that would risk investment value.

Within a decade the Tories had brought in price capping in energy anyway, which said more about the absolute paucity of ambition in Miliband’s leadership than it did in Theresa May’s beneficence. 

The sheer inadequacy of the policy became clear when oil and and gas prices rocketed at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. The price cap went up. Then it went up again, until millions could not pay their bills and one of the most right-wing governments we have seen was forced to hand money out to its citizens to pay the bills.

A cap that was not a cap at all, a regulator led by the nose by energy companies, and a government too scared of the market to take it on, safe in the knowledge that a bribe to the public might stave off unrest — and all the time the war in Ukraine blamed for the car crash.

Eight weeks into a Labour government, one of its first acts meanwhile was to remove the £300 Winter Fuel Payment from millions of pensioners to save the sort of money oil and gas giants make every quarter. Labour MPs apparently stood in tears in the lobby as they voted for the abomination, taking to social media in the search for sympathy for their ability to take “tough decisions.” parrot-tweeting about how they will drive more pensioners to claim the pension credits they are entitled to.

What goes unacknowledged of course is that if all the pensioners of Britain claimed all they were entitled to, no money would be saved by this terrible measure anyway.

All of which rather begs the question, do those making these arguments think the people stupid, or are simply exposing their own deficiencies?

No excuses should be countenanced. By Labour’s own research, the measure will cost 4,000 lives, and for what? To perhaps save a rounding error in the national budget? To look tough? To “send a signal”? 

At the same time we hear plenty about a “just transition” and promises of lower prices in the future from Scottish and UK governments, but it remains a mystery to me — and I suspect them — how they intend to deliver this without some semantic gymnastics or taking ownership of the sector.

Here in Scotland, the last oil and gas refinery faces closure at the loss of 500 jobs on site and thousands more beyond. Eight per cent of Scotland’s manufacturing base and 4 per cent of its GDP is at stake, all in the hands of an enterprise over which politicians refuse to take control.

Unite’s Scottish secretary Derek Thomson hit the nail on the head when he said: “Unite does not accept that the future of the refinery should have been left to the whim and avarice of shareholders. The complex is critical to the nation’s manufacturing base and energy security. The governments involved cannot simply hide behind the smokescreen that this is a commercial decision which they couldn’t influence.”

The irony of the announcement coming a day after the SNP Scottish government announced their long-overdue Green Industrial Strategy, which managed the amazing feat of being neither green, industrial, or a strategy, shouldn’t be missed. 

While the work of the Grangemouth’s Labour MP Brian Leishman in standing with and advocating for the workers deserves praise, as things stand we have a local SNP MSP Michelle Thomson claiming a buyer she cannot name (having signed a non-disclosure agreement) will put in a “serious offer” for the site, and the pledge of a £100m Scottish and UK government support package for the town.

The package, I’m sure, is welcome, and should Thomson’s mystery buyer snap up the site, that may well save livelihoods for now, but who really thinks these are long-term answers?

We live on an island with almost infinite potential for renewable energy, surrounded by more than enough oil and gas to see us through the transition to it, while the steelworkers of Port Talbot and oil and gas workers of Grangemouth and hundreds of thousands like them who stand ready, willing, and able to deliver a transition face the dole.

Only the organising genius of the market would pay workers to be idle, their skills unused while pensioners freeze for the want of heat; and only politicians’ slavish worship of that genius stands in the way of a tomorrow where every worker knows real security, their potential fully realised, free from fear and from want.