Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare? Becoming Margaret Thatcher

LONDON — When Keir Starmer wanted to woo Conservative voters, he knew just who to talk about.

Penning a column in the Daily Telegraph, a favorite for Tory supporters, the center-left Labour leader heaped praise on Conservative titan Margaret Thatcher.

The late prime minister “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor,” Starmer wrote. The Iron Lady, in charge from 1979 to 1990, had achieved “meaningful change” by “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.”

Now Starmer is in Downing Street, plotting his own bid to change the country, including massive plans to overhaul the U.K. energy system. And he is invoking Thatcher again — this time to try and avoid the industrial strife that defined her legacy and could derail his own.

The tension comes from Labour’s commitment to hitting urgent climate targets. Starmer has promised to decarbonize the country’s electricity grid by 2030. It is an enormous challenge achievable only by rapidly ramping up renewable energy sources like wind power and solar farms — and phasing out oil and gas almost entirely.

Labour’s election manifesto pledged to hike taxes on fossil fuel producers, partly to fund investment in new green tech, and to ban new drilling licenses. 

Keir Starmer is in Downing Street, plotting his own bid to change the country, including massive plans to overhaul the U.K. energy system. | Pool Photo via James Glossop via Getty Images

But sidelining oil and gas, based almost entirely in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, hits an industry which directly employs nearly 30,000 workers and supports 200,000 jobs across the wider supply chain, according to lobby group Offshore Energies UK. 

That’s roughly the same number of jobs lost in the decades after the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike, when an industry of 187,000 workers was reduced to almost zero. The pitched battle between Thatcher and the unions is widely regarded as the most bitter industrial dispute in British history. 

“I know that he supported Margaret Thatcher a couple of times over the past couple of years, but I’m sure even Keir would not want that mark on his character,” said Joe Rollin, senior organizer at Unite the Union, the biggest financial backer of Labour which represents thousands of fossil fuel workers.

Reassurance

Starmer can see the parallels — and is in a hurry to stamp out any idea of history repeating itself in the North Sea. 

“We had a transition away from coal,” he said last month, at an event to promote his government’s big green agenda. “The [Thatcher] government of the time did not do the formal planning for the next generation of jobs, and there are communities across the country still feeling the effects of that. I’m never going to allow that to happen under a Labour government.”

The prime minister will know the strength of feeling on his backbenches, too. “We in the Labour movement remember only too well what happens when communities are faced with the sudden loss of jobs,” said left-leaning former minister Barry Gardiner before the election. “We remember the closure of the pits, and the communities that were left with nothing, because government failed to put in place genuine alternatives and a just transition.”

Angela Rayner, who joined Starmer at a Downing Street meeting with union bosses earlier this month. Carl Court/Getty Images

Starmer has sent out his top lieutenants to try and reassure workers’ groups that he does indeed have a plan.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner joined the PM at a Downing Street meeting with union bosses earlier this month.

And Energy Secretary Ed Miliband hosted unions including Unite and GMB — which also represents tens of thousands of North Sea workers — at his department this week. “We only succeed in this endeavor [the green transition] if we embed economic justice. And we only embed economic justice if trade unions are at the heart of this vision,” Miliband told an event a few days before.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, though, has not met with oil and gas firms since the election, frustrated industry leaders say. The Treasury declined to comment on the claim.

Meanwhile, public sector unions have already landed big wins over pay — a signal to unions that there are deals to be done with this government.

But the charm offensive aimed at fossil fuel workers still has some way to go. “Decimating the oil and gas industry in the U.K. is not going to save the planet. If we go for bans rather than plans, we are going to see investment cut, jobs being hit, and working-class communities suffering as a result. We are going to strangle investment in the industries of the future,” GMB boss Gary Smith told POLITICO last year.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, though, has not met with oil and gas firms since the election. | Pool Photo by Lucy North via Getty Images

Unite refused to endorse the party’s manifesto this year, warning Starmer he had not promised enough on protecting oil and gas jobs. When Starmer headed for Glasgow for a rally immediately after the general election was called in May, he arrived to find Unite had plastered the town with billboards warning about the threat his plans posed to the industry.

Labour’s push for a rapid green transition is “premature until they’ve shown us what their alternative jobs look like,” Rollin warned. 

“We’ve asked the Labour Party numerous times to show us what their plan is, but they’re very vague at best,” he said. Rollin added: “That’s just not good enough for us. We need to have a proper concrete plan that’s costed out, that shows us where the decommissioning jobs are going to come from, where the training is going to come from, where the supply chains are going to come from.”

Future green jobs had to mean more than “someone delivering a pizza on an electric bike,” he said.

“Our members aren’t stupid who work in these industries. They know they’ve got to transition, and we’re not against any sort of transition. But what we are against is letting workers fall off a cliff edge,” he added.

‘Impervious to Labour’s charms’

Warning signs were visible to Labour even as the election results rolled in.

On a night when the party cruised to power by flipping seats across the U.K., one region was stubbornly resistant to Keir Starmer’s promise of change. 

Two Labour candidates in the six industry-focused constituencies in north-east Scotland managed a second-place finish in their seats. The rest finished third or lower. Local Conservative and Scottish National Party candidates, both parties with explicitly pro-oil and gas platforms, clung on, even as their colleagues were being wiped out elsewhere on the electoral map. 

Tom Lubbock, founding director of pollsters JL Partners, said North Sea industry and net zero were “areas where the direction of travel was clear from Labour during the campaign.” Choosing Miliband, a leading advocate for the green transition, “as shadow secretary of state also signaled [Labour’s climate plans] clearly,” Lubbock said, “and despite an almost unprecedented electoral success in England, Wales and Scotland those seats in the north-east of Scotland remained impervious to Labour’s charms.” 

After near extinction at the election, the SNP is clinging to the oil and gas row as one route back to political success. Labour must honor that promise of “no cliff edge” for workers, said Dave Doogan, the party’s energy spokesperson, or it is Scottish workers who “will pay the heaviest price.” 

For their part, Labour is resting its hopes on Great British Energy, the government’s much-touted state-backed energy company, which will be based in Scotland. Scotland Secretary Ian Murray said: “The clean energy transition represents a huge opportunity to generate growth, tackle the cost-of-living crisis and make us energy independent once again. We are aiming for cheaper, clean energy by 2030 while also helping to create 650,000 jobs across the U.K. and 69,000 in Scotland.”

Policy plans

Labour’s political promise to move the U.K. economy quickly away from reliance on fossil fuels also has an environmental imperative. The government’s independent advisors, the Climate Change Committee, said in their progress report last year: “The U.K. will continue to need some oil and gas until it reaches net zero … [but] this does not in itself justify the development of new North Sea fields.” 

North Sea production should be kept “as low as possible,” the CCC added, with a rapid shift instead to renewables, better energy efficiency, and electrifying industry and transport. 

Green think tanks have ideas on making sure reduced emissions are compatible with protecting workers in older, dirtier parts of the energy sector. There are policies ready to roll which could “significantly soften the impact” for those employees, said Adam Bell, former head of energy at the old Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, now at consultancy Stonehaven.

Labour should plow £1.1 billion a year into a green skills training fund, for example, a report from the left-of-center Institute for Public Policy Research said earlier this year, and revive plans making it easier for oil and gas workers to shift to clean energy offshore without having to get recertified. This would be complemented with beefed-up careers advice for workers moving from fossil fuels into renewables, and unions should have a seat at the table in planning the green transition, the report said.

“Workers are very concerned about job security, and if there was a clear path for them out of the [fossil fuel] industry, they’d be interested in taking it,” said Joshua Emden, the report’s author.

Odd couples

But industry leaders and union heads remain wary of Labour’s plans, a shared skepticism which has created an unlikely alliance between workers and bosses.

The GMB signed a memorandum of understanding last November with Brindex, the punchy oil and gas lobby group, focused on stronger worker protections in exchange for a united front in the push for “pro-jobs policies and strengthening energy security.” When OEUK published its own pre-election manifesto, it backed greater union representation in the industry, too.

And it goes beyond agreements on paper. Oil and gas bosses are renewing their relationships with unions, including coordinating their lobbying efforts in Whitehall, according to three figures familiar with sector plans.

One industry figure said: “I can’t remember a time when the unions and industry have been quite so aligned on the risk to U.K. energy security and jobs.”

“There’s certainly a common cause in ensuring that the people who work in the sector are absolutely at the heart of the transition,” OEUK Chief Executive David Whitehouse added. 

“We’re strange bedfellows,” acknowledged David Latin, boss of oil and gas giant Serica. “But I would say what we’re all interested in, collectively, is growth in U.K. investment and growth in jobs. And the conversations we’ve had with the unions suggest that they understand where they’re coming from on this.”

It spells trouble for Starmer and Miliband, predicted one of the figures familiar with sector plans referenced above. “I think, also, that the unions will become increasingly more powerful and highlight the risk of North Sea jobs,” they said. 

Additional reporting by Charlie Cooper