Grangemouth jobs slaughter: Nationalisation now!

Gary Clark reports 

In a brutal blow for workers and the Grangemouth community, PetroIneos have confirmed that the oil refinery will shut by mid-2025. Almost 500 workers’ jobs are in jeopardy. An estimated 2,000 others – sub-contractors and those in the supply chain reliant on Grangemouth – are also threatened as a result. Grangemouth is the only oil refinery in Scotland, which supplies around two-thirds of the oil in Scotland and around 15% for the UK. 

These job losses will have a massive impact on Grangemouth and the wider community. INEOS is a major employer and received over £140 million in grants and loans from the Scottish and UK government in 2013. This was in response to INEOS management threatening closure while insisting on a three-year no strike deal, cuts in workers’ terms and conditions as well as the removal of trade union convenors. 

The economic impact if this shutdown goes ahead will remind many of the effect on pit communities that were devastated by the closure of the coal mines in the 1980s and 1990s. Grangemouth sits right between the Lothian and Fife coalfields. 

Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, whose union represents the oil refinery workers, commented: “This is an act of industrial vandalism, pure and simple. This dedicated workforce has been let down by PetroIneos and by the politicians in Westminster and Holyrood who have failed to guarantee production until alternative jobs are in place. The road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs….This is yet another example of workers paying for a crisis they did not create while billionaire owners laugh all the way to the bank.”

Socialist Party Scotland wholly agrees with these sentiments. But the defence of these vital jobs can best be secured by Unite demanding that the Westminster and Holyrood governments bring the facility into public ownership. This would allow the continuation of oil refining while giving time and also funding for the necessary and rapid transition to alternative forms of use, including sustainable aviation fuels, low carbon hydrogen and other alternatives.

nationalisation

It is welcome that the local Labour MP for Grangemouth, Brian Leishman, has now said it is “most definitely” time for the nationalisation of the Grangemouth refinery. “We’ve got to pull out all the stops and that includes nationalisation.” Leishman accused both the Scottish and UK governments of “holding the hand” of Petroineos and that they had “meekly accepted the narrative that the refinery is unprofitable, which I would absolutely contest.”

This underlines the necessity of demanding the opening up of the books of the PetroIneos joint venture for trade union inspection. Why should the workers simply accept the bosses’ propaganda that this is a loss making operation. 

So far, the demand for nationalisation has not been made by Unite, which is a mistake. Particularly as the response from the SNP-led Scottish government and Starmer’s Labour UK government has been so completely insufficient. 

Jointly, the two governments have announced a fund of £100 million to “create new opportunities for jobs” in the area, to “provide tailored support that will help affected workers in finding new employment” and investment in “local energy projects.

Promises of the creation of 1600 jobs in the Grangemouth and Falkirk area over a 30-year period will taste like ash in the mouths of skilled workers facing immediate job losses. It smacks of the blatant lie of “regeneration” that Scotland’s mining, steel and heavy engineering communities were promised under Thatcher when faced with mass redundancies. 

In other words neither government has any intention of fighting to retain the existing jobs. Rumours of a potential private buyer for the site are circulating, but there would be no guarantees on jobs, pay or pensions from another big business operator. 

INEOS is owned by the billionaire, anti-union hatchet man Jim Ratcliffe, as is the whole Grangemouth complex. He owns other companies as part of INEOS group including the Forties Pipeline Systems. There is no way that a vital energy resource like Grangemouth should be held in the private hands of a billionaire with a record of trying to smash effective trade union representation. 

As we said in our leaflet distributed at the Unite demonstration at Grangemouth in August, which called for immediate nationalisation: Socialist Party Scotland believe that key is the “nationalisation of not just Grangemouth but the energy industry as a whole. It’s long past time the profiteering energy giants – whose record on jobs and workers’ rights is appalling – were brought into public ownership under workers’ control and management.” 

“A workers’-led energy transition would be based on public ownership and the drawing up of a plan for alternative use for the skills of workers at Grangemouth. Crucially, it would be based on job expansion, not the loss of hundreds and thousands of jobs like we have seen in the energy sector over the last decade.” 

It’s crystal clear that Starmer intends to make workers pay for the crisis of capitalism. Mass trade union pressure can force concessions. But the demand for nationalisation of companies threatening mass sackings has to be a central demand of Unite and the trade union movement generally. As is the building of mass trade union and community campaigning including industrial action. 

a new workers’ party 

Socialist Party Scotland has been campaigning consistently, calling on the trade unions to launch a new workers’ party. Unite and other unions should assist in that process while calling on those MPs suspended from Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and others elected to parliament on a anti-war and left platform to assist in that process. 

In the first month of Starmer’s Labour government, the reasons that the working class needs its own party, armed with a socialist programme, are being demonstrated very clearly. If you want to help build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s Labour and the SNP – join Socialist Party Scotland.