First published at richieventon.blogspot.com
By Richie Venton, SSP Workplace Organiser
It must be the biggest sell-out in modern history; certainly, in Scotland.
About 40 years ago, Scotland’s burgeoning Oil and Gas production was handed over to an ugly clutch of planet-trashing multinationals in an orgy of privatisation by Maggie Thatcher’s Tories, which meant the vast wealth flowing from the North Sea never benefited the people of Scotland, or indeed those of the UK. Fabulous profits were siphoned off and sent abroad, with maximum tax-dodging thrown in.
Now, the Scottish government has followed fundamentally the same path in the ScotWind development of Scotland’s lucrative offshore wind energy production, squandering an estimated £5.5billion to the annual income of Scotland.
Wind Privatised
Over 7,000 square kilometres of Scotland’s seabed have been auctioned off, at £700million, for the construction of the biggest offshore windfarm project in Scottish history – 17 different sites, estimated to be capable of generating 25 Giga Watts of electricity, where one GW is enough to power 750,000 houses!
This sell-off was conducted by Crown Estates Scotland (CES), whose chair and board are appointed by the Scottish government. And it must be the biggest fire sale ever!
The options to construct massive, super-profitable windfarms were auctioned off at one-third the original estimated value set by the government offshoot, CES. All bar one of the successful bids came in at the capped price set by CES, meaning it was grossly undervalued, seen as “cheap at twice the price” by the collection of fossil fuel capitalists and overseas multinationals who have been handed power over Scotland’s main source of renewable energy production.
Not a single one of the successful bidders is based in Scotland; they are from Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Nigeria and England.
Over 20% of the total has been grabbed at fire sale prices by two of the globe’s biggest polluters, BP and Shell.
Shell and its partner Scottish Power – which contrary to its name is owned by Spanish giant, Iberdrola – have seized the seabed space to construct two of the world’s first large-scale floating offshore windfarms: MarramWind (the biggest of all 17 projects auctioned off) and CampionWind, which between them will have the capacity to generate 5 Giga Watts, enough to power over 6 million homes.
BP and its German partner EnBW have bought the rights to build the Morven offshore windfarm, with the capacity to produce 3 GW – which could power over 3 million homes.
BP: ‘Literally a Cash Machine’
Let us not forget these rampant profiteers have plundered the planet for fabulous profit, as dominant members of the fossil capitalist club.
Shell has just announced a quadrupling of their profits in 2021, to £14billion – the same day that the Tories used Ofgem to lift the price cap on household energy bills by about £16.7billion!
BP’s chief executive officer, Brendan Looney (sic), notoriously and shamelessly declared his company to be “literally a cash machine” – as their profits soared at the cost of widespread, desperate fuel poverty. Mr Looney is no fool in making this description of the Big Polluter: BP raked in profits of £900 a second!
Having set the planet on fire through their decades of greenhouse gas emissions, these planet-trashers have now been issued a licence to make money out of green energy – by a Scottish coalition government that fought furiously to bask in a green light during the recent COP26 Conference in Glasgow.
Scottish Green Party Greenwash Fossil Capitalism
This grotesque sell-out of Scotland’s natural resources has been hailed by ‘Scotland’s National Party’ – allegedly the party of Scottish independence – as one of the most significant moments in our history, to quote Nicola Sturgeon.
She was backed up in this bizarre claim by the allegedly radical voice of the Scottish Green Party, Ross Greer MSP, who echoed SNP excuses that this privatisation was necessary because the government doesn’t have the capital investment capacity to develop these vast green energy projects.
Ross Greer added, for good measure, the outrageous boast “Still a long way to go but we are winning”, because the Big Oil lobbyists, Oil and Gas UK, have just changed their name to Offshore Energies UK. This is fossil capitalism being greenwashed, with the Scottish Green Party gleefully spraying the green aerosol, as Big Oil now also becomes Big Wind in an orgy of Big Profit.
Scotland Loses £5.5bn Annually
Although the £700m paid to the Scottish government for the auction of the seabed bases will be added to by annual rents of between £50m and £90m, economists have calculated this could have been an annual income to the Scottish government of at least £5.5billion, had it been carried out through a state-owned Scottish energy company.
Their estimates of the value of wind energy generation – based on the experience of the world’s biggest offshore windfarm company, Denmark’s Orsted – not only means the multinationals can recover the costs of (vast) infrastructure investment within a year, and make pure, undiluted profit the other 24 years of a 25-year licence, but recover the cost of their initial fees for the seabed licences in just two days of production!
Pure Profiteering after the First Year
Back in 2017, the SNP government promised to create a public sector National Energy Company by 2021. As we persistently warned, this was always going to be a glorified shop, a purely retail energy company, not involved whatsoever in the actual production of energy. But even that feeble plan was abandoned in September 2021 by the SNP and their new partners in government, the Scottish Greens.
Now, in the absence of a state-owned energy industry, the same coalition has handed power over to the likes of Shell, a capitalist giant not only notorious for trashing the planet for profit, but for helping to overthrow elected governments that dared nationalise ‘their’ industry, such as Mossadegh’s in 1950s Iran, and for spearheading the 1995 execution of Ken Saro Wiwa when he led opposition to Shell’s desecration of the land and people of Nigeria.
No Scottish Jobs Guaranteed
And contrary to the hosannas sung by the Scottish government, there is no guarantee that this will lead to any substantial job creation in Scotland.
The auction process itself quite explicitly excluded any regulations about the supply chain. Many of the winners in the auction are big investors in overseas turbine manufacturing, so that lessens the likelihood of job creation in Scotland compared with reliance on cheaper labour abroad to maximise private profit.
Twelve years ago, the SNP government promised 28,000 jobs by 2020 in the offshore wind industry alone. The latest available figures show a measly 1,400 actual jobs – twenty times fewer than promised. With that track record, based on adherence to the capitalist market and reliance on inward investment by marauding multinationals rather than a coherent industrial strategy rooted in democratic public ownership of all forms of energy production and distribution, job prospects look bleak.
Build Socialist Change, not Climate Change
This betrayal of the interests of the Scottish working class and of environmental campaigners by an SNP-Scottish Green Party coalition that refuses to break with the power of big business serves to reinforce all the arguments we expanded in our book, Socialist Change not Climate Change.
Unless we build a mass movement of workers and young people with a vision of democratic public ownership of all energy forms, and initiate an alternative plan of green production primarily devised and led by workers in the industry, we face a future dominated by Big Oil, and now Big Wind, with the slaughter of jobs and pollution of our planet, all in the name of Big Profit.
As a working-class eco-socialist party, the SSP will fight alongside the unions for jobs, and redouble our efforts for a clean, green, independent socialist Scotland.