The Scottish Socialist Party offers 100% solidarity to Grangemouth workers and local people battling to save every job.
We will build support for whatever collective action is needed to stop them suffering the fate of the 1980s miners.
Ahead of the planned Unite the Union rally in Holyrood on 28 November 2024, SSP Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton said:
“We will be demanding Labour and the SNP instead act now, take the Grangemouth site into democratic public ownership, rapidly invest in alternative plans of green production, informed by the biggest experts of all – the workers in the industry.
“Don’t let the capitalist profiteers or the UK and Scottish governments turn these workers into the miners of the 21st century!”
We condemn the Petroineos capitalists’ plans to abandon workers’ skills and production at a plant producing 8% of Scotland’s industrial output, with their derisory proposal to replace it with an oil terminal.
This repeats the industrial vandalism by multi-billionaire, tax-dodging, gangster capitalist Jim Ratcliffe, who in 2013 blackmailed the Scottish Government into subsidising his profits, threatening to shut Grangemouth, assaulting union organisation.
Jobs, livelihoods, and the quality of air we breathe cannot be left in the hands of Ratcliffe or his capitalist partners. Why should a few billionaires have the power to dictate the lives and health of thousands of workers’ families, who’ve produced Grangemouth’s profits for a century?
The SSP stands for democratic public ownership of Grangemouth and all energy production and distribution — as the only guaranteed means of tackling the climate catastrophe whilst also guaranteeing and improving jobs and livelihoods.
Climate Crisis
The planet is on fire, with droughts, wildfires, flooding, mudslides, rising oceans, and climate refugees fleeing mass death and destruction, then facing hostility from right-wing governments and fascists.
The August 2021 UN IPCC Report stated 64–84% of all CO2 emissions directly relate to fossil fuel combustion — so we can’t halt the climate catastrophe unless we stop burning fossil fuels. But that must not be at the expense of workers’ jobs. We cannot have a ‘No Deal Exit’ from fossil fuel production, leaving workers marooned without a future.
The SSP rejects the utterly false ‘choice’ between clean air and good jobs. On the contrary, to tackle pollution we need the expansion of skilled, unionised jobs in a green re-industrialisation. A Socialist Green New Deal, based on democratic public ownership of energy, transport, construction, major industries, banking. Research proves this could create 350,000 new jobs in Scotland — 70,000 of them in green energy production.
Workers’ Alternative Plan
The SSP advocates a workers’ plan of alternative green production, and investment by the Scottish and UK governments to urgently implement the plan.
Successive UK and Scottish governments — Tory, Labour/Lib Dem coalition, SNP/Scottish Green coalition — have utterly failed to implement an industrial strategy to turn all their fine words about “a Just Transition” or “a Saudi Arabia of renewables” into reality.
Outrageously, the SNP/Green Party coalition sold 17 gigantic offshore windfarm sites to the world’s biggest polluters, Shell and BP, for a pittance — when a state energy company could have gained £5.5bn a year.
Scandalously, instead of green job creation in Scotland, they’ve allowed ‘free market capitalism’ to dictate, farming out construction of windfarm turbines to cheap labour economies like Indonesia, dragging equipment across 7,000 miles of ocean on diesel-spewing barges.
Outrageously, the number of green jobs in Scotland has fallen by 10,000 in 4 years — despite vast expansion of wind power.
Why rely on multinational capitalists to combat pollution AND secure jobs, when just 100 corporations account for 72% of all greenhouse gas emissions since 1970? They will ALWAYS put profits first, slaughtering jobs, polluting the planet.
The Labour government abandoned its earlier promise to invest £28bn-a-year in green industries. Starmer’s GB Energy is a dirty con trick. It won’t produce ANY electricity; its £8bn of public funds will be used to fatten the profits of private capitalist companies — with no public control over their plans.
You can’t plan what you don’t control, and you can’t control what you don’t own. That’s why the SSP says ‘Nationalise, don’t subsidise’. Take all forms of energy into democratic public ownership, with workers’ control and management, instead of public funds fattening the profits of capitalist polluters.
Worker-led Transition
A genuinely Just Transition is urgent — but it must be led by the real experts, workers in the energy industry, who should have the right to help plan their futures.
Lucas Aerospace shop stewards drafted the visionary Lucas Plan in 1976, but were blocked from implementing it by the Labour government’s refusal to take Lucas into public ownership. Grangemouth trade unions should spearhead the demand for public ownership and a workers’ plan of green production — to save every job, and simultaneously help combat the climate crisis.
For people and planet, not profit — join the Scottish Socialist Party.
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Socialist Change not Climate Change: Poverty, Pollution and Working-Class Solutions
The world is on fire!
Millions of the poorest people suffer most from the rising climate crisis, caused not by ‘humanity’ but by the economic system – capitalism – which for centuries has exploited workers’ labour and plundered the planet’s resources in the insatiable greed for profit for a tiny, powerful minority.
This thoroughly researched, very readable 76-page book powerfully argues a…