Michael Shanks

This has been an interesting debate at times—at other times, perhaps it has not been—but it is a timely and important debate, as many people sitting at home will be watching the situation in the middle east concerned about the cost of living, our energy security and the impact that our energy policies have on their lives. Let me start, as the shadow Minister rightly did, with what I thought was an outstanding contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds). She rightly centred the debate, as others should have done, on the workers who have powered the country for decades. I have had the great pleasure of meeting many of them in the 20 months I have had this job—not on one visit to Aberdeen, but on many. They have done the job that we have asked of them in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. They have risked their lives—indeed, many have lost their lives—in the pursuit of the energy that we have used for six decades. I will never diminish the role that the North sea has played for six decades in powering the country. It has been a source of energy, a source of revenue and a source of good jobs not just in the north-east of Scotland but beyond that in the east and north-east of England and right across the country. Its workers are sought after around the world for their skills and experiences. My right hon. Friend rightly challenged what we have heard from the Opposition in the debate. Slogans do not protect those jobs. Standing up with nothing but rhetoric and pretending that the 70,000 jobs lost on their watch were somehow irrelevant will not help, and it diminishes the scale of the challenge we face. Slogans will not build the jobs of the future. The shadow Minister talked about a lack of turbines in Aberdeen harbour, yet his party would rip up the auction that delivers the contracts that will create those jobs—and he has the brass neck to say that that is a problem with our Government’s policy. It is his policy that caused the problem. The shadow Minister talked about numbers on a spreadsheet, as if we do not care about the workers caught up in this. That is why we are building the transition and investing in the future, while they ignored it. When we started becoming a net importer—not in July 2024, as some Opposition Members would like to pretend, but in 2003—we should have been looking at the transition. I am willing to accept that the previous Labour Government should have done more on this. The Conservatives should accept that over 14 years, as they saw thousands of jobs disappear from the industry, they should have been doing everything in their power to build up what came next. They failed to do that. We have heard a number of straw man arguments put forward today about the North sea being closed. The North sea, right now, continues to send gas into our gas network and it will continue to do so for decades to come. However, the transition is hugely important. It has been under way for decades and we have to acknowledge how important it is to invest in what comes next. The events of recent weeks should concentrate minds. We should have learned the right lessons coming out of the invasion of Ukraine but we did not, and we must now learn the right lessons coming out of this present crisis. Doubling down on fossil fuels does not give us energy security; it makes us depend even more on the very volatility that has driven us into economic problems time after time. More than half the economic shocks that have faced this country have been caused by fossil fuels, and the Conservative party’s answer is to double down and have even more of it. That is not a plan for the future of this country.