How Labour Betrayed Britain's Working Class in the Name of Net Zero

A movement born to defend workers has become complicit in the hollowing out of British industry

In Aberdeen, the warning sirens are no longer coming from offshore rigs but from the unions themselves. A recent study cited by the GMB union paints a stark picture: the North Sea’s offshore workforce, roughly 115,000 strong today, could be slashed to around 57,000 by the early 2030s if Britain’s headlong rush to Net Zero continues. For a city already bleeding skilled jobs — some 18,000 lost since 2010 — this is not an abstract climate model but the prospect of a living community turned into another deindustrialised ghost of Britain’s past.

The GMB’s Scotland Secretary, Louise Gilmour, has broken ranks with the political class by calling Ed Miliband’s policies “delusional” and warning that they risk “arguably the most destructive industrial calamity in our nation’s history”. Yet her intervention raises an uncomfortable question: how did a movement born to defend the English working class against economic dispossession become complicit in the very policies that now threaten to hollow out Aberdeen just as surely as coal-mining towns were once gutted across England and Wales?

From there, the story must go backwards before it can go forwards.

From Chartism to Labour

The English working class was not dreamed up in Marx’s study: it was forged in the mills, furnaces and pits of the early Industrial Revolution, then politically awakened through Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s. Chartism’s six demands — universal male suffrage, secret ballots, equal constituencies, annual Parliaments, payment of MPs and the abolition of property qualifications — were radical only in insisting that politics should serve those who laboured as much as those who governed.