Andy Burnham has bottled it yet again. He hasn’t made a single significant decision on defence, on welfare or on oil and gas. All things he promised he would sort during his leadership coronation.
We had been told for weeks that the Prime Minister was set to approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Burnham’s army of government spinners had been busy briefing journalists that he was going to be ‘pragmatic’ on oil and gas, and do something that Keir Starmer had always avoided. It was understood that he’d announce the new drilling licences on Tuesday at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Brighton. Rumours even beckoned a photo-op in Aberdeen.
But, as sure as night follows day, Andy Burnham has now delayed making a decision. And everyone knows why.
Labour is in a close fight with the Green Party to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election at the start of October.
In his final U-turn, Keir Starmer decided he didn’t want to stick around in Parliament with all the Labour MPs who had stabbed him in the back, so now he’s handed Burnham a tricky vote in a very Green Party-friendly area of London. And Burnham is spooked.
So the TUC speech is cancelled, the trip to Aberdeen shelved. And the uncertainty for thousands of oil and gas workers in Scotland and across Britain has returned.
The Conservatives approved the licences for Rosebank and Jackdaw when we were in government. The usual anti-growth, Left-wing, Net Zero obsessives launched a legal challenge that the Conservatives were fighting right up until Starmer entered No10.
He and his then climate secretary Ed Miliband began a lengthy consultation process, which delayed the approvals for a further two years.
Now Andy Burnham, or ‘Continuity Keir’, has kicked the decision into the long grass once more.
If he hadn’t bottled it, the gas from Jackdaw could be flowing directly into the grid, feeding some 1.4 million homes, by Christmas.
That would reduce our dependence on foreign gas imports this winter, secure vital jobs in our domestic oil and gas industry, and bring in tax revenues (estimated to be £1.4 billion by the end of this Parliament) that could be used to bring down energy bills.
Instead, we are going to continue to import expensive energy from places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, a process that has a greater carbon footprint and is worse for the environment.
It is complete madness and does nothing to stop climate change. The plan is not working. I have a different one.
A common-sense plan on energy that will help cut bills and improve the environment.
It starts with dropping meaningless targets like Net Zero 2050 and focusing on what works.
That means drilling our own oil and gas, scrapping all levies and charges that have forced up energy bills, and unravelling the red tape and regulation strangling our domestic industry.
Energy security is national security; it’s economic security. Delaying the decision on Rosebank and Jackdaw puts all three at risk.
On the day Andy Burnham won his by-election in Makerfield, Douglas Lumsden won a by-election in Aberdeen South for the Conservatives.
But where Burnham’s victory was about one man’s ambition, the Aberdeen South vote was about the tens of thousands of people employed in the UK oil and gas sector.
For their sakes, and for the sake of everyone who wants to see an end to deindustrialisation and sky-high energy bills, Burnham must get serious and approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw licences, and do it now.
