TOMORROW’S march for the future of Scotland’s Grangemouth refinery challenges Britain’s government to put its money where its mouth is on industrial strategy.
As the Unite union says, it is a test of whether Labour is serious about a just transition — or content, like the Tories, to let industries of strategic significance collapse and sentence the communities they support to the long-term immiseration that hit former coalmining areas from the 1980s to ’90s.
And the test result matters way beyond Grangemouth. Labour says it plans to turn Britain into a “clean energy superpower.” This is one of its most important ambitions, given the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But it is not possible without a new approach. Its pledge to invest £28 billion a year in green transition was torn up while it was still in opposition. This week began with Chancellor Rachel Reeves channelling George Osborne, making false analogies to household budgets to claim Britain cannot afford much-needed investment in hospital repairs, transport infrastructure upgrades or even keeping old people warm in winter.
If applied across government this attitude will scupper any hope of our becoming a “clean energy superpower.”
Western governments pat themselves on the back for their progress on climate change: but it’s so much hot air.
There is currently one clean energy superpower in the world, and it’s China.
As Professor Brett Christophers observed recently in the Financial Times, China in 2023 accounted for 63 per cent of global net additions in total renewable capacity; its clean electricity generation rose 17 per cent last year alone. If you exclude China from global statistics, the rate of progress on green transition is achingly slow.
How has China achieved this? Through significant state-led investment over years, targeted lending in strategic sectors and subsidies for renewable technologies and electric vehicles (EVs).
So far, the response from Western governments to this example has been self-defeating: retarding our own transition by trying to cut China out of supply chains, raising tariffs, even launching investigations into the way state subsidies for EVs distort the market.
Instead we should be learning from the world technological leader here, and applying to our own renewables sector the methods that have worked so successfully in China.
That means serious investment. Britain could borrow more to fund it, or it could introduce a wealth tax and raise corporation and capital gains taxes, or some mixture of these approaches and more, but as Unite’s Sharon Graham has repeatedly pointed out, sticking to Tory fiscal rules will be the kiss of death for industrial renewal. When it comes to the technologies of the future, Britain will be left behind.
Unite has made progress with the government — working with other steel industry unions to secure more funding for Port Talbot, and winning funding for Project Willow, which will explore low-carbon projects at Grangemouth.
The chances of saving the plant are growing, and doing so is not just vital for the workforce, the training for skilled, well-paid jobs it has long provided for young local working-class people, and the central place the refinery plays in Scotland’s manufacturing sector, but as a benchmark for Britain’s industrial revival.
Real investment in green jobs can also bring the labour movement and climate justice campaigners together, when they have not always seen eye to eye in the past: something seen in the demand for a just transition for North Sea oil and gas workers issued in June by over 60 organisations including the sector’s trade unions, Friends of the Earth and Extinction Rebellion.
Only through the unity of all left forces can we prevail on government to get radical on climate change. Those marching tomorrow are not just battling to secure a future for Grangemouth, but a future for us all.
