SCOTLAND’S last remaining oil and gas refinery must be nationalised, Grangemouth’s newly elected Labour MP Brian Leishman says.

The site was publicly earmarked for closure by owner PetroIneos, a joint venture between PetroChina and notorious union-basher Sir Jim Radcliffe’s industrial empire Ineos, last year. 

Despite the best efforts of the union Unite’s Keep Grangemouth Working Campaign, last week the firm confirmed it would close the site in six months as part of plans to turn the 100-year-old plant into a fuels import terminal. The move could cost up to 500 jobs on site and, according to Scottish Enterprise estimates, as many as 2,880 across the country.

A “disappointed” First Minister John Swinney told Holyrood on Thursday that a joint Westminster and Scottish government package would be put in place for workers.

But Mr Leishman said: “We need to get away from sticking-plaster solutions. There’s still time and if there’s still time, there’s still hope.” 

Condemning the inaction of governments as tantamount to negligence and “an abandonment of a workforce and a community,” he told the Star: “If there is a gap between the refinery closing and future cleaner, greener industries being ready, then the workforce is going to leave. 

He said: “This country needs to prioritise people over profit.

“This is a line in the sand. The status quo in the UK and Scotland isn’t working. I want the UK government to nationalise it, to take it into public ownership.”

Mr Leishman said: “Wealth and industry, and the country’s energy in fuel and national security should not be in the hands of another nation or private capital.

“We need to learn lessons of what happens when private industry decides: ‘right, we've used that commodity, we've exploited the resources’.

“We need to break that model, we need to break that culture, we need to take ownership now for the public good.”