Workers are at the heart of Labour’s mission to decarbonise Britain’s economy, party leader Sir Keir Starmer said, vowing to avoid the mistakes of the mass closure of coal mines in the UK.
Labour will build strong supply chains that create jobs, Starmer said, pledging to “seize” the opportunities of hydrogen, carbon capture, and storage.
“Change is coming and yes it can unsettle us. But mark my words, on my watch, good jobs—good, union jobs—will be fundamental to that change,” Starmer told the congress.
His address comes after media reports suggested that Labour would promise to halt new oil and gas production in the North Sea in its net zero energy policy.
In the Q&A session following Starmer’s speech, a GMB Scotland member said that Labour’s position on new oil and gas licenses will affect Scottish jobs and UK energy security.
“When the current fields in the North Sea are depleted and Scotland’s oil and gas jobs evaporate, what will you tell your members working in these sectors and in communities which will be decimated?” the member asked.
Starmer said now is the time to “seize the next generation of jobs in nuclear and renewables” across the country.
“Oil and gas are going to be part of the mix for decades to come, into the 2050s. What I will never let happen is the repeat of what happened in coal mining, where an industry came to an end and nobody planned for the future. And we are still living with the consequences,” the Labour leader said.
He stressed that Britain needs to be in the race on the next generation of jobs.
“I have estimated it, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be had. Future jobs. Fifty thousand jobs in Scotland. We can use the skills we’ve got,” Starmer said.
‘Cliff Edge’
Starmer told the congress that during his Monday visit to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, he was told by GMB boss Gary Smith that in the supply chain to Hinkley Point the only thing that’s made in Britain is the concrete, while everything else comes from abroad.“We’ve got to use vehicles like GB Energy, that will be a publicly-owned vehicle, where we determine where the jobs are to ensure that they are here in the UK, and that we have incentives in contracts, to look at supply chains and where the jobs are for the supply chains” Starmer told the union members.
Smith has been critical of Labour’s policies, having suggested they “are going to create a cliff edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea.”
The energy sector has been promised “tens of thousands of jobs” in renewable energy “time and time again” but that they “simply have not emerged,” Smith added.
A Conservative Party spokesperson referred to Smith’s comments and said that even Starmer’s “union paymasters have slammed his policy.”
The spokesperson added that Labour’s leader had “soundbites and wishful thinking but no plan for the tens of thousands of jobs he would destroy.”
The full details of Labour’s green energy plan are expected to be revealed next week.
