Fantasies of Britain’s past continue to shape the country's energy politics and illusions.
As war in the Persian Gulf sent oil prices surging above one hundred dollars a barrel, Reform UK pledged to “make Britain energy independent once again by drilling for our own oil and gas.” Richard Tice, the party’s energy spokesperson, who divides his time between his Boston and Skegness constituency and the United Arab Emirates, pledged to go further. If elected as part of a Reform government, he said, he would mimic the Emiratis by using tax revenue from hydrocarbons to begin a British sovereign wealth fund.
Reform have spotted a chance to make a common-sense case for North Sea oil and gas, one born out of national necessity, against a Labour government that has prohibited future offshore drilling. These are affective arguments. They tie the day-to-day lives of millions of voters to major decisions of state. On 10 March, the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, filled up cars at a Derbyshire petrol station which the party operated for a day in a PR stunt meant to simulate the cuts to fuel duty that the party would pass on to motorists when in power. Labour’s green levy taxes, Farage said, were “lunatic”, as was the drilling ban. By reversing them, he said, the country could generate fiscal revenues and secure critical supplies of gas and oil.
Even as North Sea production dwindles, the prospect of opening up streams of British oil in these newly turbulent times has begun to animate a renewed debate between environmentalists and the Trump-inspired set keen to “drill baby drill”. What is often missed in this debate, however, is that North Sea oil and gas is now a chimera, as supplies dwindle and accessing what remains becomes ever more difficult and expensive. Yet the promise of offshore bounties remains tantalizing close in the political imagination, fuelling all manner of fantasies. These are made all the more powerful by instilling a belief in the popular imagination of left-wing forces blocking Britain from once more becoming rich and energy secure.
Nationalism has often been conceptualised through the imagined communities of millions of people, made real through senses of shared historical stories and culture. A more trite, if no less real, version takes a sporting embodiment, with the nation attached to the eleven named individuals on the starting line-ups of national football teams. To this, we can now add energy sources as another means of imagining nationhood and realizing its wealth and power. The history of the North Sea demonstrates this leveraging of energy for national identity. Importantly, however, it has not been confined to the politics free market right; it has form on the left too, providing inspiration for both Scottish and British nationalists alike.
Petro Politics
“The United Kingdom is a solid lump of coal floating on a bubble of oil and gas.” This pithy description was offered by Clive Jenkins, the General Secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs, to the Scottish Trades Union Congress annual conference in 1985. Jenkins, an articulate Welshman who understood the intimate connections between carbon fuels and nationhood, pointed delegates gathered in Inverness out to sea, to the offshore platforms which were then transforming life and work in the Scottish Highlands. These, he said, would be crucial to determining the UK’s future.
As Jenkins’s comments demonstrate, British politics in the late twentieth century was animated by energy, both solid fuel on land and burgeoning offshore resources. One of the forces that benefited from this environment was the pro-independence Scottish National Party, who rose to electoral prominence in the first half of the 1970s in part by proposing a petroleum-fuelled vision of economic prosperity. SNP activists offered Scottish voters the opportunity to be “Rich Scots” instead of languishing as “Poor Britons”.
The prospect of oil made this seem a feasible option. In the early 1970s, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) emerged as one of the key players in international affairs, particularly after its embargo on western countries who had backed Israel during their October 1973 war against a coalition of Arab states. This would also help to develop the association of oil with national wealth and power. It was in the aftermath of the embargo, and with petroleum prices spiralling, that the SNP announced its major political breakthrough, recording thirty per cent of the vote at the October 1974 general election and taking eleven seats having campaigned under the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil”.
Even before the war broke out, prices had been rising. To these shocks, Britain was acutely vulnerable. Two decades earlier the country was humiliated at the hands of Nasser’s Arab nationalist government, when in 1956 the Egyptians nationalised the Suez Canal. It was American pressure that forced the British, French and Israeli forces to climb down to Egyptian intransigence, but so too did the freezing of tanker shipments to oil hungry Western Europe. In the decade that followed, hydrocarbons came to replace coal as Britain’s main source of energy; the discovery of offshore gas fields in 1965, with oil following four years later, could not have come at a better time.
Those early gas fields were discovered in waters east of Norfolk, but petroleum deposits were overwhelmingly concentrated off the coast of Scotland, in the North Sea. Oil from the Argyll field first began to flow on 18 July 1975, with the first barrels greeted by a jubilant Energy Secretary, Tony Benn, at the Isle of Grain refinery in Kent. Benn even called for a day of British “national celebration”, with a future of petroleum plenty lying ahead. In a sign of the cosmopolitan character of the global oil industry that has shaped the British North Sea sector since its inception, particularly the heavy role of American firms, as he waited for the Liberian registered tanker to bring the oil to the Isle of Grain Benn was pictured with Fred Hamilton, owner of the Texan oil company Hamilton Brothers, who operated the Argyll field. Offshore drilling expertise gained from the Gulf of Mexico would provide an essential foundation for work in the North Sea, even if North Sea platforms had to be much larger to withstand the tougher environment.
While it was difficult to extract out of the ground, North Sea oil was politically safe and highly profitable, not least in the context of sky-high oil prices of the 1970s and early 1980s. The arduous working life offshore and the feats of engineering required to drill oil, however, have rarely intruded on economic discussions of the North Sea, which primarily focus on the balance of payments and state revenues.
In July 1975, Benn was asked whether he had ambitions to join OPEC, a question he jokingly brushed off. He was engaged in a more contentious battle at the time. For Benn and other partisans of Labour left, oil was a national resource which ought to be subject to extensive public ownership. Oil windfalls were a chance for national rejuvenation as deindustrialization began to fray Britain’s economy. The Department of Energy’s 1978 white paper, The Challenge of North Sea Oil, argued for the spending of revenues productively, prioritizing productive investments in industry, infrastructure and workforce training. Even under Labour, this was a compromise position, avoiding the direct linking of oil revenues to budgets for particular policies or the question of investing the revenue in a wealth fund.
Benn’s most ardent political opponents also understood how formative oil would be to Britain’s future. Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the Conservative opposition, quipped during a House of Commons debate “that the real challenge was not in spending the proceeds of the oil but in exploring for it, producing it and bringing it ashore—a task which was completed almost exclusively by private enterprise.”
When Thatcher entered Downing Street a year later, her government set about privatizing the newly formed British National Oil Corporation and ensuring that oil revenues were spent in the general budget rather than being ring-fenced for specific purposes. In doing so, her government benefited from relatively high North Sea taxes, while prioritizing a “free world” zone of oil extraction. This would ultimately contribute to lowering prices and undermining OPEC’s dominance of the international petroleum sector. It also played a role in transforming Britain into an increasingly finance-driven and unequal economy marked by a heavy dependence on international markets.