IIn 2023, it was reported that the then leader of the opposition Keir Starmer interrupted a shadow cabinet presentation by Ed Miliband to declare “I hate tree huggers”. Starmer’s spokespeople denied that the incident ever took place, and the mini-scandal quickly blew over (not before enraging some members of the Just Stop Oil-adjacent left).
But whatever the truth of the matter, the episode illustrated a tension over practical focus and rhetorical framing. Is the green transition, the move to net zero, to be billed as a project to restore the natural environment, to conserve the flora and fauna of a planet withering under the weight of man-made industry? Or is it a catalyst for creating millions of high-skilled, productive, green jobs of the future, for regional industrial renaissance and green tech, for public infrastructure upgrades and an investment-led effort towards national renewal via net zero?
In choosing between what we might call a more conservationist, nature-based approach, and a jobs-and-skills approach, Starmer, we were told, would prefer to orient towards the latter.
Miliband, for his part as the shadow energy secretary, revealed to us before the election a “vision of well-paid, highly skilled jobs, with strong unions and training”. In a similar vein, Rachel Reeves – as shadow chancellor – made a keynote intervention through a well-regarded Mais Lecture. In it she heralded a new era of post-neoliberal scepticism towards what she called “hyper-globalisation”, and promotion of an active industrial policy. The Labour Party would, she said, “mobilise investment” to “develop skills” across a range of domestic supply chains in “regional clusters”. These efforts would “modernise a sclerotic economy”, and reduce the need for fossil fuel imports, presaging an age of energy independence, resilience and security.
But we are now more than six months into the Labour administration. It is feeling more and more awkward to call this a “new” government. And rather than a re-skilling or redeployment of a carbon-intensive workforce into the green “industries of the future”, the decline of traditional manufacturing has continued apace and even accelerated. This decline is yet to be accompanied by a flurry of parallel, net zero job creation.
Since polling day last July, we’ve seen: the iconic Belfast shipbuilder Harland & Wolff subject to a rescue deal involving a Spanish state-run company; lay-offs at Port Talbot as the steel-maker transitions to a greener electric arc furnace; jobs under threat at the steelworks in Scunthorpe; the rapid decline of the chemicals industry; and the closure of the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland and its conversion into an import terminal to be managed under the auspices of a Chinese state-owned petrochemicals giant.
If this is what Reeves had in mind when she talked of “securonomics”, then it certainly won’t feel secure for skilled workers yet to see any benefit from the alphabet soup of new government bodies: the National Wealth Fund (NWF), Industrial Strategy Council (ISC), or Great British Energy (GBE).
“You can’t let go of one rope before you’ve grabbed onto another,” says Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, which represents workers at Grangemouth as well as in the steel industry. “If we are going to transfer to renewable energy then we need to have the infrastructure in place, and we need to know where the jobs are. Because there’s no doubt – you could transfer oil and gas workers to wind manufacturing. You could have commensurate jobs. There may be some different skillsets, but there’s nothing insurmountable.”
But that kind of joined-up effort is yet to appear. Graham has opposed Labour’s cancellation of new oil and gas licensing because workers in the sector – which is well-paid, safe and highly skilled compared with jobs in the maintenance of offshore wind facilities – risk becoming “the miners of the net zero”.
“We’re going to lose the jobs in Britain, lose the industry in Britain, not create any jobs in Britain, and then be reliant on other countries for our energy”, she says. “They haven’t got a plan for new jobs, and we’re still importing oil.”
It needn’t be this way. As an advanced economy, we are still using and consuming steel in vast quantities, not to mention running a gas-reliant grid that will continue to rely on emergency dispatchable gas generation even beyond the net zero target date. Meanwhile, glass, cement, concrete and a whole variety of chemicals all remain essential to modern life. And all still rely on carbon-based materials and energy in their production processes. Green hydrogen, green steel and sustainable aviation fuel are emerging energy sources that will develop rapidly in the near future as demand for essential goods with a lower carbon footprint intensifies. But they are not here yet, or at least not always at prices that would make them competitive. In the meantime, we are in danger of losing the jobs, skills, expertise, institutions and industries that could make British versions of these green industries a success. The demand is here, but the jobs of the future are being created elsewhere.
On steel, Graham says, the government could mandate that all UK infrastructure or public sector construction must use British-made steel, which would be within World Trade Organisation rules. Rather than importing turbines, cables or solar panels from Denmark or China at the lowest possible price, a robust industrial strategy would create a domestic supply chain supporting UK jobs and, therefore, the UK Exchequer.
Currently, the net zero mission has created huge demand for renewables and associated products, but the supply chain is still largely foreign. The benefits of the UK’s enormous investments in the transition are being felt in Guangdong province, where workers mass produce photovoltaic cells for export using cheap, abundant energy, often from coal-fired power stations. Meanwhile, mass production of this kind in the UK becomes increasingly uneconomical, given we have the highest industrial energy prices in the world.
In her Mais lecture, Reeves told us that skills had been “one of our most consistent policy failures” of the last few decades. Addressing the skills gap would be a “requirement for economic success”, she added. Skills England, a new executive body, will oversee national skills and apprenticeships policy. But “where are the jobs?” Graham asks. For there to be a demand for skills in high-productivity, high-growth, green sectors, we first need a plan to create the industries, jobs and supply chains.
“We know what’s said about the jobs,” adds Graham. “But where are they?… We’ve been promised 650,000 in these new, green industries [the figure is from the Labour manifesto]… But show me them. I can’t see them. Is someone driving an electric delivery bike working in a green industry of the future?”
Labour’s net zero mission document promised “no worker or community” would be “left behind”. As President Trump tears up the Paris Agreement, and Chinese exporters continue to dominate green tech markets, net zero in the UK is likely to fail on two fronts. It will begin to appear as a simultaneously futile exercise that permanently entrenches deindustrialisation and one that acts as a final surrender to a new economy of low-paid hospitality and insecure service work. If the government doesn’t reverse this, and make good on its commitments, it’ll be more than the tree huggers that it disappoints.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Skills supplement of 7 February 2025.
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