LABOUR’S plans for a public energy body based in Scotland risk a repeat of the party’s doomed attempt in the 1970s to set up a national oil company which was then scrapped by the Tories, an expert has warned.
Dick Winchester, an energy technology consultant, said the proposal unveiled to create GB Energy by Sir Keir Starmer in Edinburgh last week could end up in “exactly the same boat” as the former British National Oil Corporation which was once headquartered in Glasgow.
Set up by then energy secretary Tony Benn in 1975, he said the firm had been aimed at replicating the Norwegian energy company, now called Equinor, which has the state as the main shareholder. The country has created a huge wealth fund from the surplus of oil trade revenues.
Winchester said: “It worked, up to a point – typically being British they didn’t put enough money into it, but it did work up to a point.
“Until, of course, Margaret Thatcher got in and said, no, we don’t want any of this and decided to scrap the whole thing, split it up, retain one bit of it, sell off ultimately the operating arm to BP and let the other arm eventually just fade away. And that was it, dead and gone.
“So we never got that company to champion Scottish or UK technology development.”
He added: “It is one of the main reasons we now still don’t have a record having ever manufactured very much of the sector-critical hardware that we needed in the oil and gas sector.
“And unless Labour get this right for the new plan of British Energy or whatever they’re going to call it, it will end up in exactly the same boat.
“When the Tories come back in here in five years or 10 years or whatever, then they’ll just do the same thing, they’ll sell it off.”
The energy plan unveiled by Labour provoked controversy, prompting one senior Scottish Labour councillor to resign from the party condemning it as a “brutal putdown” of the oil and gas industry.
Barney Crockett, who served as Aberdeen City Council leader between 2012 and 2014, said Starmer’s plans were made without any consultation with local party members, adding: “Margaret Thatcher never delivered a more brutal putdown of an industry than that delivered by Keir Starmer in Edinburgh.”
There were also clashes between Humza Yousaf and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar at First Minister’s Questions on Thursday over the policy.
Sarwar asked the First Minister to welcome his party’s plans for a publicly owned GB Energy firm to be set up north of the Border, but Yousaf said the plan would “abandon” workers in the oil and gas sector.
Winchester, who has advised the Scottish Government but clarified he is not an SNP member, criticised Labour’s plans as “complete vagueness”.
“It’s certainly not going to do what I hope it would do – the whole thing spins around the need for this so-called just transition,” he said.
“You can’t have a just transition unless you can actually guarantee that you can replace the existing oil and gas jobs and you’re talking about 90,000 or so people here ultimately over time, with jobs of equal value.
“And the only way of doing that currently is to considerably boost the manufacturing of hardware, like offshore wind turbines and wind turbines generally, hydrogen technologies, of which, of course, we manufacture absolutely zero in Scotland – and other similar things.
“In other words, you want to replace those high-wage, high-skill jobs with equal high-value, high-wage, high-skill jobs.
“To me this entire plan seems to completely ignore that and it makes some wonderful claims.”
Winchester said the Scottish Government’s idea of creating a state-backed energy company, which was dropped in 2021, was “interesting” but “never really feasible”.
“All they were talking about, as far as I can gather, was effectively acting as a resaler which is what a lot of the companies like Bulb and Octopus do in the hope they can get a better deal and maybe ignore the profit motive and reduce prices that way,” he said.
“The only way you would ever make a real impact is to become an operator and an investor in developing your own wind farms or solar farms and so on.
“That’s pretty much impossible under devolution because of the total lack of borrowing power. They just couldn’t have done it.
“The chances of creating an Equinor or anything in Scotland were zilch under the current devolution arrangements – you can only possibly do it through independence.”
Labour did not respond to request for comment.
