I WAS working alongside Mike Forbes at his croft in Menie, Aberdeenshire, when he told me about Piper Alpha. He had been a rigger on Tartan, a neighbouring platform on that fatal night, July 6 1988. “Piper,” he said, “was a deathtrap.” He watched it all night “burning bonnie” because they were “pumpin’ and pumpin’ and pumpin’” oil and gas into the fire for hours.

How could this be true?

The 167 men who died that night died unnecessarily, on a rig that the Department of Energy had declared safe just 11 days before.

Piper itself was a giant rig, the hub at the centre of the Piper oilfield, and the 67 men on shift were able to produce 10 per cent of the UK’s entire energy needs. It was the most capital-intensive workplace in the world.

Operated by one of the smaller US corporations, Occidental, after the explosion it was ringed by safety vessels who only managed to rescue 61 men from the sea. No helicopter managed to land and no other means of escape — other than jumping — was possible.

That this, the biggest offshore disaster ever, has been visited and revisited in the subsequent decades by numerous filmmakers for STV, National Geographic and now the BBC in a major three-part series, is testament to the fact that the trauma lingers on without closure.

Forbes will be fascinated by this well constructed and highly sympathetic series, directed by Laura Blount, but he won’t find the answers he is looking for.

Immediately after the accident the Department of Energy — under the then Tory minister Cecil Parkinson — was legally responsible for the regulation of safety over the entire UK continental shelf. It issued a speculative explanation, based on no factual evidence, that blamed the accident on members of the workforce who died that night, effectively deflecting their own culpability. A flange hadn’t been properly fastened, they surmised.

This hypothesis was then adopted as the “most likely” trigger to the catastrophic cascade of events by the Cullen Inquiry (1989-1990), itself appointed by the Ministry of Energy, and once again in the absence of firm evidence.

All the films made since — including this one — breathlessly parrot this version of events, blaming a workman, and finding ingenious ways to retell it as history.

For funky graphics try Explosion In The North Sea (2004, National Geographic); for interviews with many of the same survivors try Fire In The Night (2013, STV) or Oil Rig Explosion (2017, Smithsonian).

For this version, Disaster At Sea, in a clever sleight of hand, actors impersonate the witnesses at the inquiry and also appear in reconstructions of events on the burning rig.

Those survivors that are still alive contribute in person alongside their grown-up children as well as the children of those who died on the night, or since. It makes for a “human-interest” TV story that is well-constructed, patient and dignified. It climaxes with the fatal chain of events, and the disaster remains compelling, and appalling.

But as John Foster, Charles Woolfson and Matthias Beck note in their definitive study Paying For The Piper (Mansell, 1996): “The notion that Piper Alpha was a freak accident brought about by an unlikely combination of circumstances might have consoled much of the public, but for the offshore workforce it was simply not acceptable.”

Ultimately, Piper Alpha remains compelling not because of the ferocity of the accident but because it is still burning, an unresolved point of conflagration between the British government, the oil corporations, the workforce and the public.

The documentary acknowledges that Occidental got off scot-free, but can’t bring itself to admit that, via a network of mutual interests, the British government ensured that this happened, through a relationship with capital known as “regulatory capture.” This obvious case of criminal manslaughter was dismissed by a Scottish judge, Lord Fraser who, just seven years after his decision not to prosecute Occidental, joined International Petroleum Exchanges as oil futures market chairman.

And, as you listen to this version of the story you cannot help but ask: where were the trade unions?

This fascinating aspect is entirely absent and the main failing of the series is that while appearing to take the greatest care it makes this kind of obvious omission, leaving more questions than it can answer.

When Armand Hammer, CEO of Occidental, is shown claiming that his company has no record of safety failures, or when Cecil Parkinson is shown claiming that the Department of Energy is not responsible for safety in the North Sea, these bare-faced lies are documented but the film doesn’t call them out. Rather the blame is surreptitiously shifted towards Tony Benn, a recognisable socialist, in a totally unfair misrepresentation of his early attempts to unionise the industry.

But Benn was dismissed and, against their will, unions were barely represented in the offshore industry. The reason for the aggressive non-unionisation of the offshore workforce, and for the non-appliance of health and safety standards that applied onshore, are the same reasons that Piper Alpha itself was so poorly maintained. Political reasons.

The British government of the 1970s needed cash — and fast — and, unable to develop the industry fast enough on its own, they invited US capital to run the game. US capital itself was keen to extract profits from environmentally dangerous but politically aligned territories to see off the challenge that Opec (The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) made to their dominance of the market at that moment.

As the parallel development of the Norwegian oil fields demonstrates, it didn’t need to be done this way. But it was, and that’s why an oil platform like Piper Alpha was retro-fitted for gas in a way that compromised the design, and why not just its decaying and dangerous structure but even its faulty water-dousing systems were unmaintained. Maintenance was an avoidable expense for a short-term investment.

This haste, and this neglect, were held in place by a hostile management and signed off as safe by the British government, the woefully understaffed Department of Energy itself, in a stunning conflict of interest.

This vital explanation — how the British political establishment covered for US capital — explains a lot, but you won’t find it in the media.

But the major fault of this series is more subtle and insidious: a deliberate misrepresentation of the workforce response to the tragedy.

For them, it says, this was a tragedy and there is no escape from grief: cue the Piper Alpha Monument and a rollcall of names. This is a portrait of grief trapped in spirals of denial and the false consolations of so-called “bolstering,” the rationalisation that the work was dangerous and the men knew it.

But the real workforce response was diametrically opposite as Foster and co demonstrate. It resulted in a “transcendent” eruption of class consciousness and an unofficial strike that, despite extreme management hostility, spread like jet-fire to more than 100 rigs in 1989 and 1990.

Spontaneously, the workforce experience of tragedy was “integrated into a larger concept of political understanding implying the need for change.” Their demands, co-ordinated by the unofficial union Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC), were not for wages, but for changes to the entire system.

This happened at the same time as the Cullen Inquiry was in progress, and yet this essential and inspiring context is mentioned nowhere, and neither is the vigorous participation in the inquiry itself of the TGWU and the MSF whose cross questioning was so accurate and revealing that Cullen felt obliged to award them a miserly 40 per cent of their costs. 

All we get in terms of workers’ organisation is the social work derived Piper Outreach Team which, marvellous as it was, was no match for big capital nor a protagonist in industrial relations.

So, accomplished as it is, this series continues to tow the establishment line, to ignore organised labour, and once again the presumption to have told “the Piper Alpha story” is deeply misleading.

Without the political and economic background — the penetration of the British government by US capital — and the astonishing response of a workforce in a non-unionised workplace, the story cannot be told fully, or with respect to those who died or survived, or their children, and certainly not to the satisfaction of Mike Forbes.

Disaster at sea: The Piper Alpha story is screening now on BBC2, and all episodes can be found on BBC iplayer