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2 days ago
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One of the biggest political battles of the future began to take shape in 2024, yet it did not centre on Westminster. Instead, try Grangemouth in central Scotland, Port Talbot in south Wales and Luton in the south of England. Their stories were not front-page staples, but each was of huge significance – locally, nationally and economically.
Grangemouth is Scotland’s sole oil refinery, whose owners confirmed in September that it would shut, to be replaced by a terminal taking in imported fuel – with nearly 400 workers losing their jobs. In the last days of September, the only remaining blast furnace at Port Talbot was shut down, as part of a restructuring that will cost 2,800 employees their jobs. At the end of November, staff at Vauxhall in Luton were told the plant would shut, ending 120 years of the carmaker’s association with the town and putting between 1,100 and 2,000 jobs at risk. One result was two days of protests in the town a week before Christmas.
Oil, steel, cars: three pillars of what you might call the fossil economy. In his recent book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, John Vaillant writes: “One way to visualise a tank of gas is to imagine a mass of ancient plant matter weighing as much as fifteen blue whales crammed into a tank next to your spare tire, just behind your child’s car seat. A typical driver can burn that in a week, often for the most trivial of reasons.” Those sentences sum up the precarious miracle of the economy on which billions of people depend for a living and why it will be so difficult to move to a carbon-free future. Nevertheless, governments around the world now talk of a “just transition” allowing workers in the old fossil industries to find good jobs in the green economy. Both Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer have conjured up visions of the UK as a world leader in this new economy, and yet the collapses seen from Luton to Grangemouth show how much turbulence lies ahead.
Vauxhall’s owner has blamed Luton’s closure on government targets for electric vehicle sales, in which carmakers are effectively fined for not shifting enough electric cars and vans. That may have been a convenient alibi – Luton was shrinking long before Whitehall talked about net zero – but it crystallises the politics of this issue. Politicians are both hastening the end of fossil industries and making grand promises about what will replace them. In his first visit to Scotland as prime minister, Sir Keir singled out century-old Grangemouth as a “real priority” – a nice phrase that made no real difference. Mr Johnson dreamed of his country becoming “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”, yet the UK has only two facilities capable of making wind turbine blades while, just over the North Sea, Denmark has the biggest wind-power industry in the world.
The politics of this look sadly familiar: every closure, every big job loss will aid those on the right who claim net zero is a zealots’ agenda. In Port Talbot, where a plan has at last been fixed for a new electric future, locals point out that Asian countries are still opening the old-model blast furnaces. It is the job of Labour and others who take the just transition seriously to increase both the money and urgency behind it. Otherwise, local unemployment will produce local devastation and widespread resentment that can be mobilised by the most reactionary forces. The challenge is profound.
