Miliband on ‘messianic drive’ to pull plug on North Sea extraction, says Bowie

Ed Miliband is on a “messianic drive” to pull the plug on North Sea oil and gas extraction, the shadow Scotland secretary has warned as he backed his party’s pledge to abolish the Climate Change Act.

Andrew Bowie described UK oil and gas policies as “unhinged”, and said the country was a “shining light on how not to decarbonise”.

Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, last week used a speech in Liverpool to attack pro-fracking parties, and urged Labour activists to send “frackers packing”.

At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Mr Bowie listed a series of things he would like to “get rid of”, including Mr Miliband, the energy profits levy (EPL) on extraordinary oil and gas profits, and the Climate Change Committee.

He said on Wednesday: “It is actually horrific.

“It is terrifying when you see the rate of decline in that industry, when you look at the forecasts for unemployment in Aberdeen and around the north-east of Scotland, they’re talking about a Grangemouth-sized event every two weeks.”

Grangemouth oil refinery closed earlier this year, to become an import and fuels distribution terminal, hitting around 400 jobs.

A Robert Gordon University report found that the North Sea oil and gas workforce could shrink by around 400 each fortnight for the next five years, falling from 115,000 in 2024 to between 57,000 and 71,000 by the early 2030s.

“And the fact of the matter is – it is, of course, about jobs and in my constituency, that’s especially true – but it’s actually about our energy security, and it’s utterly perverse,” Mr Bowie continued.

“It’s absolutely insane.

“It’s unhinged, the policy we have right now – a tax rate of 78% and a ban on licenses and exploration, leading us to a point where we’re having to import more of the gas that we use, import more from Norway, who are drilling it from the very same sea that we are being prevented from doing by Ed Miliband.”

Mr Bowie, who is also a shadow energy minister and the West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine MP, added: “We need to stop this.

“It is utter madness in the name of eco-zealotry and one man’s messianic drive to be the man that stopped the fossil fuel industry in its tracks in this country, and that man is Ed Miliband.

“We need to get rid of Ed Miliband and we need to get rid of the EPL.”

He also said: “We need to overturn the ban on exploration and licensing.

“We need to overturn the Climate Change Act. We need to get rid of the Climate Change Committee.”

Senior Conservative figures have used their Manchester get-together to criticise the Climate Change Act, the commitment in law to a “net zero” reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Scrapping the legislation is “not about denying climate change”, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho told BBC News earlier this week.

“It’s about questioning whether our plan is working,” she said, and added it imposed a “series of targets across the economy and it’s making things more expensive at the same time as wanting people to use electric cars and electric home heating”.

Former prime minister Baroness May of Maidenhead, now a Conservative peer, said she was “deeply disappointed by this retrograde step which upends 17 years of consensus between our main political parties and the scientific community”.

In his speech last week, Mr Miliband said: “I’m incredibly proud of British climate leadership. I’m incredibly proud of Labour climate leadership.”

He claimed his and the Conservatives’ opponents in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party would “wage war on clean energy – a culture war they are importing from the United States, driven by the rich and powerful interests who fund them”.

Turing to hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas trapped inside shale rock, Mr Miliband said: “Let’s ban fracking.”