hedera.baltica from Wrocław, Poland, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This was my unpublished letter to Labour List this week.

When James Tibbits says, in suggesting that approving the Jackdaw gas field will relieve pressure on the cost of living: “while arguments are made that it is just not that simple, when dealing with the politics of perception,(my emphasis) this choice may help to relieve some of pressure the Labour government has been facing” he gives the game away that this capitulation to, as he puts it “sustained pressure from right wing parties in the UK, alongside US President Donald Trump, to approve Jackdaw, as well as the oilfield Rosebank” isn’t about reality, its about optics.

Its not about relieving pressure on the actual cost of living, but about relieving pressure on the government by making a gesture that doesn’t actually cut costs or reduce anyone’s bills, and will cost 17 times more in climate impacts than any economic benefits it generates, but simply attempt to appease a fake right wing narrative.

In doing so, it only throws more fuel on the fire, in more ways than one, as playing along with right wing smoke and mirrors will generate more smoke, probably in the form of pyro cumulonimbus clouds. We should all redouble our efforts to make sure that this dreadful decision is not repeated for the Rosebank oilfield.

And when Antonia Bance argues that putting tariffs on Chinese EVs will help the UK reindustrialise she misses the point that reindustrialisation here requires exactly what China has done there: putting state resources into the development of the technologies that we need to make the green transition. This is not “unfair competition”, it produces the EVs and Solar Panels the world needs in a way that “the West” has failed to do.

The UK, and the EU and US, have left this to the market; with the result that we have a fossil fuel legacy vehicle sector that is now outmoded and outcompeted and likely, without either state investment and/or joint arrangements with Chinese companies, like the one Chery is proposing with Nissan in Sunderland, to go the way of British Leyland all too soon, tariffs or no tariffs, delayed EV mandate or no delayed EV mandate.

Averting this needs pre-emptive planning for all the threatened sectors, as well as nurturing the “green economy” that is currently growing at 9% a year while the rest of the economy flatlines. It is long past time that England and Wales had Just Transition Commissions on the Scottish model, but with more teeth, and switching the proposed £35 billion a year expansion in war spending to retooling the whole of our economy and society so we have good, solid jobs making it sustainable; rather than preparing to blow ourselves up.