The government is considering the future of Rosebank and Jackdaw, two major North Sea oil and gas developments. Their previous environmental approvals were ruled unlawful because they failed to assess the emissions produced when the oil and gas was eventually burned. Fresh decisions are now required.
Unite wants both projects approved. Its general secretary, Sharon Graham, argues that North Sea workers are losing their jobs before replacement industries exist. The union’s slogan, ‘No ban without a plan’, makes the point that workers cannot be expected to accept unemployment, the destruction of their communities and vague promises that green jobs may appear sometime in the future.
But Unite draws the wrong conclusion when it turns this into support for another round of private oil and gas investment. Instead of fighting to take the transition out of the hands of the energy companies, it demands that those companies be allowed to continue deciding what is produced and where investment goes.
Britain will continue to use some oil and gas during any serious transition away from fossil fuels. Gas is still used for heating, electricity generation and industry. Oil remains embedded in transport, chemicals and manufacturing. Even a socialist government could not replace all of this overnight. It would have to decide what fossil-fuel production was still necessary, where it should come from and how quickly it could be reduced as alternatives were built.
That is why the transition has to be planned.
Under capitalism, oil and gas companies invest where they expect to make a profit. Energy is bought and sold on international markets. Infrastructure is built according to expected returns, while workers and communities live with the consequences.
Approving a new North Sea field is therefore not the same thing as giving working people control over their energy supply. The government itself admits that Britain is a ‘price-taker, not a price-maker’ for oil and gas. Domestic production enters an international market. More North Sea production may reduce reliance on particular imports, but it does not give workers control over prices or guarantee cheaper energy.
Energy security is important. Dependence on imported fuels can expose a country to wars, supply disruption and sudden price rises. But at the same time, there is no meaningful energy security while the system remains privately owned and organised through the market.
A tanker carrying imported liquefied natural gas and a pipeline carrying North Sea gas are different sources of supply, but both remain governed by prices, contracts and company decisions made by the owners. We need enough secure energy to keep homes warm, hospitals running and industry operating while fossil-fuel use is reduced. That requires control over reserves, generation, storage, the grid and investment.
The transition cannot therefore be reduced to a timetable for shutting individual fields. It has to be a plan for the whole energy system and the industries which depend on it.
The same problem runs through Labour’s energy policy. Ministers talk about clean power and energy security, but leave investment, production and much of the transition itself dependent on markets and private capital. Profitable activities continue while socially necessary but less profitable investment is delayed or avoided. Workers are told to move, retrain or wait.
Grangemouth
Scotland’s last oil refinery stopped refining in April 2025. Its workforce was cut from around 475 to 75, with about 400 refinery jobs lost. Unite estimated that almost 3,000 jobs depended on the refinery’s operations more widely.
The union argued that replacement industries had to be established before production ended, and identified projects which could have retained industrial production and skilled jobs at Grangemouth. On this it was right. Governments should have intervened before closure, maintained the workforce and begun converting the site under public ownership.
Instead, the refinery closed first. Workers were made redundant and offered retraining while future projects were still being discussed. A ‘just transition’ which is experienced as closures and layoffs will not enjoy the confidence of workers—and indeed fuels the reactionary backlash against it.
The experience of Grangemouth should lead to a fight for ownership and control, not political support for whatever new fossil-fuel investment the energy companies propose.
A trade union has to defend its members. North Sea workers have every right to resist redundancies, falling pay and the destruction of skilled jobs. But the working class is bigger than any one group of workers.
Workers also pay energy bills. They live in homes threatened by floods and extreme heat. They depend on transport, food production and public services which will be damaged by an accelerating climate crisis. Millions of workers need new housing, expanded public transport, insulated homes, renewable energy, a rebuilt grid and huge investment in industry.
The answer cannot be for each section of workers to defend its immediate position inside the existing market and hope the wider problem sorts itself out. Taken far enough, sectional trade-union politics puts workers in the position of defending the profitability of ‘their’ employer or industry against other workers and against the needs of society as a whole.
For North Sea workers, that risks turning the unions into a pressure group for fossil-fuel capital. The oil companies are not allies of oil and gas workers. They employ them when it is profitable and sack them when it isn’t. They will close a refinery, abandon a field or move investment elsewhere if the figures tell them to. That’s why workers need an independent programme.
Take energy into public ownership
The major energy companies should be taken into public ownership without compensation to the big shareholders. Oil and gas production, electricity generation, renewables and the grid should be brought together under workers’ control.
Workers in the industry should help decide how production is reorganised, while communities affected by the transition should have a say in investment. Decisions about energy should be made according to social need, not shareholder returns.
A workers’ plan would guarantee jobs, pay and conditions during the transition. Nobody should be thrown out of work because a refinery closes or an oil field winds down. Workers should be transferred onto equivalent unionised jobs with no loss of pay, with paid retraining where necessary.
That requires enormous public investment: renewable generation; an expanded and modernised grid; millions of insulated homes; replacement of gas heating where practical; cheap electrified public transport; and the industrial capacity needed to manufacture turbines, cables, trains, heat pumps and other equipment.
At the same time, the oil and gas production which is actually required would be maintained while alternatives were built, then reduced according to a democratically agreed plan.
This is different from both Labour and Unite’s current policies. Labour wants the market to deliver the transition. Unite increasingly responds by demanding that the market continue to provide fossil-fuel jobs. Neither challenges the power which determines the outcome.
Capitalism has no overall plan. Each company follows prices and profits; each state competes for investment, markets and energy supplies. If producing more oil is profitable, capital will try to produce more oil. If shutting a plant raises returns, capital will shut it.
That is capitalism’s rapacious algorithm: not a conspiracy by individual capitalists, but the ordinary operation of competition and profit producing a result that threatens society as a whole.
Breaking that logic requires more than a better government policy or a greener set of investors. It requires working people to take control of production, and that means building a movement inside the industries which have to change.
Climate politics which treats oil and gas workers as an obstacle will fail. Those workers possess skills, organisation and industrial power that any serious transformation of the energy system will need. But organising workers does not mean telling them that their future depends on another project for the oil majors.
Socialists and militants in the unions should fight for no compulsory redundancies, guaranteed alternative employment, public ownership and workers’ control. They should link North Sea workers with workers in renewables, manufacturing, transport and the wider labour movement.
The demand should not be ‘save our industry whatever the cost’. It should be: take the industry out of the hands of capital and use its resources, infrastructure and workforce to carry through the transition ourselves.
The fight over Rosebank and Jackdaw poses the issue clearly. We reject a transition which makes workers pay, but we also reject the idea that protecting workers means defending the investment plans of the oil companies.
Jobs and the climate are only made enemies by a system in which both are subordinated to profit. The working class needs its own alternative: public ownership, workers’ control and a democratic plan for energy and industry.
