Cambo, the SNP and Big Oil

Matt Dobson

It has been a summer of fire from the Greek islands to Siberia. And floods from the Rhine to the Thames.

The IPCC report on Climate Change gave a red alert to humanity around carbon emissions. The planet is burning and only systemic change can halt it.

Those responsible for rising CO2 emissions are the big business polluters, including the oil and gas companies who have made massive profits from of the North Sea around Scotland for decades.

The group of young climate campaigners who recently met SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon over plans to exploit the Cambo oilfield west of Shetland perhaps thought she would understand and oppose it.

After all at the time of the 2019 climate strikes, which mobilised tens of thousands of school students across Scotland, the SNP-led Scottish government declared a climate emergency!

Sturgeon has also taken part in forums with world famous climate striker Greta Thurnberg.

Under pressure, and with the COP26 conference in Glasgow just a couple of months away, she has now written a letter calling on the UK Tory government to “reasses” granting the licence to Shell and Siccar Point for the Cambo oilfield.

Groups like Greenpeace are completely correct to say Sturgeon is hiding behind the Tories.

Rather than oppose it outright, her letter meekly calls for a four-nation summit to discuss the issue.

She puts faith in the ‘North Sea Transition Deal’, saying it’s progress, although it should go further. Workers, young people and climate campaigners will see a document of empty promises by oil and gas multinationals about a “just transition” that will save jobs and slowly cut emissions into the 2030s and 40s.

But can we trust the oil and gas multinationals who got the planet into this mess to hit the net zero target?

The same bosses who when the pandemic hit and the oil price dropped, made over 8,000 North Sea oil workers redundant?

Whose appalling safety record has seen disasters on rigs like Piper Alpha and workers falling to their deaths in unsafe helicopter transport?

Who from Shetland to Deepwater Horizon to the Niger Delta have caused environmental disasters?

Boris Johnson has already dismissed Sturgeon’s timed appeal to ‘reasses’. Hardly surprising given the multi billion pound potential for multinationals and government tax revenue this huge new oil field represents.

According to Energy Voice, Cambo could yield as many as 255 million barrels of oil over its lifetime – and produce an estimated 132 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. The reality neither the Tories nor Sturgeon and the SNP cannot be trusted to stand up to big oil.

It’s Scotland’s oil

North Sea oil, when discovered in the 1970s, was the key element in the SNP’s capitalist case for independence.

They coined the slogan: “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. While laying claim to the oil, the pro-capitalist SNP leadership has never been prepared to call for the nationalisation of oil and gas and have merely asked for an independent Scotland to control the tax revenue to create an ‘oil fund for future generations’.

The SNP have been uncritical for decades of the cowboy practices of multinationals despite the dire consequences for workers and their communities.

Former SNP leader Alex Salmond opposed the New Labour chancellor Gordon Brown’s extremely limited attempts to impose a windfall tax on oil and gas companies in 2005. The SNP leadership described it as “punitive” and it would “close down any future exploration”.

Salmond also offered Scottish government bailouts to the union-busting Ineos and their ruthless capitalist Jim Ratcliffe during the lockout and attacks on the Grangemouth refinery and petrochemical plant workforce in 2013.

For decades the SNP leadership advocated Scottish independence predicated on an oil rich “Celtic Tiger”. The fossil fuel boom was destroyed by the 2015 oil price crash which saw tens of thousands of workers lose their jobs in the North Sea.

The SNP have been no friend to oil and gas workers and the trade unions who have faced a constant war by bosses driving a race to the bottom in wages, terms and conditions and the undermining of collective bargaining.

There is widening schism among the SNP membership between a young layer in urban areas that wants an end to fossil fuel industries, and the SNP’s historic base in rural and oil industry dependent areas like Aberdeenshire.

Sturgeon is trying to balance between the two, and the wider mood in society that something needs to be done on the worsening environmental crisis.

Kirsty Blackman, SNP Westminster MP, has criticised the UK government for being too slow in reducing taxes for oil and gas companies. MSPs like Maureen Watt call publicly for further oil extraction.

The Scottish Tories are attempting to stoke up the very real fears of workers and communities in areas economically dependent on North Sea oil and gas by pointing to the real weaknesses in the “just transition” policies of the SNP and the Greens.

no trust in capitalist policies

The reality is workers and young people can have no trust in any of the pro-capitalist leaders who will attend the COP26 conference in Glasgow. And that includes the SNP and the Scottish Greens as well.

It is not possible to have a “just transition” to renewable green energy under capitalism. Already capitalists from the “green sector” including agronomy are lobbying around COP26 calling for “Green New Deals” – in effect massive state handouts to big business to profit from renewable energy.

As long as industry and the means of producing are in private hands then workers will be exploited for profit and the potential of new technology will not be realised. An example of this is seen with manufacture of wind turbines in Scotland being moved abroad for lower labour costs by capitalists.

Therefore Socialist Party Scotland, while opposing the drilling of Cambo, calls for a worker-led, socialist transition plan based on nationalising the oil, gas and major polluters.

Unlike the Commonweal, the Scottish Greens and the Labour left who merely call for the creation of a public energy company – we say bring the entire energy sector into public ownership under democratic workers’ control and management.

This would mean highly skilled oil and gas workers could be redeployed into renewable energy production without loss of jobs or worsening of conditions. Nor would there be any need for price hikes for fuel as is promised by the energy giants this winter.

This would be part of a socialist transformation internationally based on a planned economy that takes over energy, finance and the major corporations to allocate resources to the needs of the majority. We need a mass workers’ party that fights for these socialist policies. 

Socialist Party Scotland, Young Socialists and the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign will be calling for mass protests and strikes at COP26 by school and college students and the trade unions to force the need for a mass publicly owned and funded program of renewable energy investment.

For a massive programme of job creation that could solve the unemployment and housing crisis and create the necessary renewable energy infrastructure to really deal with the climate crisis that capitalism has created.