More than forty progressive economists just signed an open letter telling Unite leader Sharon Graham to shut up and accept the Net Zero future. They claim Ed Miliband’s green agenda is a jobs machine. They cite a shiny £100 billion figure. They wave spreadsheets showing a million new green workers.
They are completely detached from industrial reality.
I have spent twenty years watching capital flee the United Kingdom because of well-meaning, mathematically illiterate policy decisions. I have seen the shuttering of steelworks and the slow death of refining capacity up close. When academics from London universities lecture a trade union leader about job creation, it is time to look at the actual ledger.
The consensus view among the economic elite is simple: stop drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, and the market will instantly provide high-wage, unionized manufacturing jobs in wind turbine assembly.
This is a dangerous lie.
Sharon Graham is entirely right to call this agenda a noose around the neck of British industry. The progressive economists defending the current strategy are selling an accounting trick, not an industrial strategy.
The Mirage of the Green Job
Let us look at how that famous one million green jobs figure is actually calculated. It is not a count of factory workers welding steel structures or engineers building advanced power grids. The Office for National Statistics uses broad definitions. If an accountant spends ten percent of their time auditing a solar park, a portion of their salary is categorized as part of the green economy. If a consultant writes a compliance report on carbon emissions, they are a green worker.
Imagine a scenario where a highly skilled refinery worker earning £60,000 a year in a unionized industrial hub is laid off because of strict regulatory pressure. Six months later, a multinational firm hires an agency worker on zero-hour contracts to bolt imported solar panels onto a field in the south of England. To an academic economist, that is a successful transition. To the communities that depend on heavy industry, it is economic vandalism.
The reality of the British supply chain is bleak. The UK does not manufacture the vast majority of wind turbine blades, solar cells, or high-voltage direct current cables. We import them. We import them from countries with cheaper energy and lower environmental standards. The actual domestic employment generated by these massive capital projects is overwhelmingly concentrated in two phases: temporary civil engineering during construction, and permanent paper-pushing in London offices.
The Disconnect Between Academics and the Shop Floor
The signatories of the letter to Unite include prominent professors and think-tank directors. These individuals are brilliant at constructing theoretical models where labor is perfectly liquid. In their models, a worker is simply a unit of production that can be easily shifted from an offshore oil rig to a home insulation project.
They do not understand the structural realities of industrial employment:
- Wage Degradation: Green installation jobs pay significantly less than established heavy industry roles.
- Geographic Dislocation: The remaining industrial hubs are in the north of Scotland, Wales, and northern England. The green service economy lives in the south.
- Union Density: Wind and solar installation sectors are notoriously difficult to unionize, replacing strong collective bargaining with precarious contract work.
The intellectual class argues that opposing Miliband's strict timeline means denying climate change. That is a false binary designed to silence criticism. You can acknowledge the reality of climate science while recognizing that killing your domestic supply chain before building a domestic replacement is economic suicide.
Where the Capital Actually Goes
Ed Miliband boasts that private sector companies have pledged over £100 billion into the green economy. This sounds impressive in a press release. But look closer at where that money is directed.
The vast majority of that capital is going into asset ownership and grid transmission infrastructure, not industrial production. National Grid spending billions to upgrade cables is necessary, but it does not build a manufacturing base. It is a regulated asset that guarantees a return to investors, paid for by higher standing charges on household energy bills.
I have watched international capital markets evaluate British energy policy. When a global conglomerate sees that the UK is banning new North Sea licenses while failing to subsidize domestic steel manufacturing, they do not invest in British factories. They invest in Danish turbine manufacturing or Chinese supply chains, then sell the finished goods back to British taxpayers.
If you want a real transition, you do not start by cutting off your own energy supplies. You start by building the industrial capacity to manufacture the components of the next generation energy system. The current policy puts the cart before the horse, dismantling the old economy before the new one is physically built on British soil.
The Real Price of Intellectual Consensus
The danger of this academic consensus is that it creates a political blind spot. By dismissing the concerns of major industrial unions like Unite and the GMB, the political class is alienating the very people who keep the lights on.
There is a downside to the contrarian view. Slowing down the transition or continuing to issue North Sea licenses means maintaining a dependence on fossil fuels for longer than anyone desires. It means accepting that carbon reduction will happen at a slower pace than the climate models demand. That is an uncomfortable truth. But the alternative is worse: a hollowed-out nation that imports its energy, imports its technology, and exports its working class to the welfare rolls.
The progressive economists want us to look at the macroeconomic aggregates. They want us to celebrate growth in the service sector while ignoring the collapse of productive capacity. Sharon Graham understands something they do not: a country that cannot make things, or refine things, is a country without leverage.
Stop listening to the spreadsheets. Look at the towns where the refineries and steelworks are dying. That is the true measure of our current industrial policy.
