The Scottish Socialist Party has sent its full solidarity to Grangemouth workers and everyone fighting to save jobs. The SSP is backing calls for workers to join the March for Jobs this Saturday.
SSP Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton wrote:
“The Scottish Socialist Party offers 100% solidarity to Grangemouth workers and local people battling to prevent these highly skilled workers becoming the miners of the 2020s, marooned without a future under the guise of a move towards a greener future – when in fact it’s naked profiteering by the capitalist multi-billionaires of Petroineos that is the real motivation.
“The SSP has been encouraging fellow-trade unionists to join the workers’ March for Jobs this Saturday, and we will build support for whatever collective action is required to resist this jobs slaughter, which would turn the area into another ghost town. We condemn Petroineos 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. Here is our account of this battle, written in February 2013.”
“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, as presented by employers and mainstream politicians. On the contrary, to tackle pollution we need the expansion of skilled, unionised jobs in a green re-industrialisation of Scotland and beyond. A Socialist Green New Deal, based on democratic public ownership of energy, transport, construction, major industries, banking. Research (in our book Socialist Change not Climate Change) 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/LibDem coalition, SNP/Scottish Greens 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 £5.5billion a year. We warned of the consequences at the time: Richie Venton: BIG WIND, BIG SELLOUT, BIG PROFIT.
“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.
“You wouldn’t rely on a pathological arsonist to douse the fires he’s lit in your house. So 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 £28billion-a-year in green industries. Starmer’s GB Energy is a dirty con-trick. It won’t produce a single kilowatt of electricity; its £8billion 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 are unmatched in their knowledge of the practicalities, technology and retraining required, and who should have the right to help plan their futures.
“Way back in 1976, the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards’ committee drafted the visionary Lucas Plan, with proposals for multiple socially useful alternative products to their reliance on the arms industry – which was slaughtering thousands of jobs at the time. But they were blocked from having this job-creating Plan implemented by the Labour government’s refusal to take Lucas into public ownership.
“Learning from this experience, 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.
“Keep Grangemouth workers in jobs, without loss of pay or conditions, through a workers’ alternative plan of green production, invested in through democratic public ownership.
“Join the fight for a Socialist Green New Deal for people and planet – not profiteering and pollution by billionaire fossil capitalists. Join the SSP.”
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…