Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics have shown that the number of ‘green’ jobs in Scotland has fallen for the fourth year in a row.
The Scottish Socialist Party is campaigning for an industrial plan for Scotland that cuts greenhouse gas emissions, reduces poverty, and creates well-paid, secure jobs – a Socialist Green New Deal.
We must fight the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis together.
That includes taking Scotland’s vast energy resources into democratic public ownership, including offshore windfarms.
The SSP is spearheading calls for tens of thousands of new jobs and apprenticeships to retrofit 2.6 million dwelling and public buildings and to build 100,000 new environmentally-friendly council homes across Scotland.
Bringing shipyards, turbine manufacturers, and marine technology production into public ownership could create 70,000 well-paid, secure, unionised jobs in Scotland in the next 20 years.
The STUC’s “Green Jobs in Scotland” research has found that 60,000 jobs could be created in Scotland by bringing public transport into public ownership and upgrading transport fleets. The SSP supports democratic public ownership of transport and free public transport for all.
SSP Workplace Organiser Richie Venton said:
“While the SNP/Scottish Green Party government desperately seek a green light to bask in, the harsh facts show Scotland is going backwards, not forwards, in the creation of ‘green’ jobs.
“Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the number of jobs they classify as ‘green’ has fallen from 21,400 in 2019 to 20,500 in 2020. That’s the fourth consecutive year where job numbers have fallen, from 24,000 in 2016.
“And even those figures for ‘green’ jobs are stretching it: the ONS classification covers 17 industries, including nuclear power, which is not my definition of clean, green energy!
“The SNP government of Alex Salmond promised Scotland would become “the Saudi Arabia of renewables”. As the STUC’s Roz Foyer put it, “all they got was a desert.”
“SNP government failure to develop a coherent industrial strategy – above all refusal to take the energy industry into public ownership – has meant that even with the expansion of sectors like offshore wind farms, jobs are not being created.
“Oil and gas workers are eager to transfer to these sectors, but instead face redundancies and frequently the choice of unskilled jobs in Scotland or migration for work.
“Now, after the much-trumpeted entry of the Scottish Greens into government, we witness the outrageous sell-out of gigantic offshore windfarm developments to profiteering capitalists, all of them from outside Scotland – with Big Polluters Shell and BP awarded 20% of the total.
“Another recipe for a jobs desert in Scotland. So much for ‘Scotland’s National Party’! So much for the Scottish ‘Green’ Party!
“These facts hammer home the urgent need for a Socialist Green New Deal, rooted in democratic public ownership of all forms of energy production and distribution. With existing energy workers leading the plans for a genuinely Just Transition to clean, green energy, vastly expanding the number of jobs, not slashing them.
“That’s the alternative advocated for years by the SSP. That’s the alternative comprehensively argued in our recent book, Socialist Change not Climate Change.”
We face stark choices: socialism. or climate catastrophe and job losses.
“Socialist Change, not Climate Change: Poverty, Pollution, & Working Class Solutions is available now.