Oil workers have called for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to be sacked as a second UK oil refinery moves towards closure.
The 125 job losses at the East Lindsey site were announced on the morning of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour Party conference.
But Unite’s Sharon Graham, head of the union which represents workers at the refinery, warned Sir Keir needed to rescue the government’s industrial strategy with fresh investment to protect jobs.
Urging him to “wake up and smell the coffee”, Ms Graham said there could be no growth agenda when the country’s industries were shedding jobs.
Jamie Dalgetty, Unite branch chairman at East Lindsay, said workers had lost faith in Miliband and his junior energy minister, Michael Shanks.
“As part of the National Oil Refinery and Terminal Convenience Committee, I can speak for all of us that we’re calling for Ed Miliband and Michael Shanks’ removal from their position,” he said.
He added that Miliband needed to support takeover bids for the site, in a similar government intervention to the one taken at the Scunthorpe steel works, also in north Lincolnshire.
Ms Graham called on the prime minister to intervene and get the industrial strategy and the Net Zero strategy back on track, because “it is a disaster” that two oil refineries are facing closure in less than a year “under Labour’s watch”.
“They’ve got to have a plan for British industry, you cannot just do this piecemeal,” she said, comparing Germany’s £1 trillion plan for energy diversification to the UK’s £50bn.
“It doesn’t make any sense for a growth plan if you’re allowing oil refineries to shut down and other parts of British industry to shut down,” she said.
“We need to have the money, like Germany’s just done, they’ve changed their fiscal rules, we need to have the money to invest in these jobs.”
The Unite general secretary criticised what she said was a net zero plan for jobs rather than carbon, adding that Chancellor Rachel Reeves should change course by growing the UK economy through investment in jobs.
She called on Reeves to pay down the UK’s debt to GDP ratio by loosening the fiscal rules and funding industrial renewal in her November budget.
“They need to borrow money for our industry,” she said. “It’s not as though that money disappears.
“Let’s grow Britain by investing in jobs, that’s what they need to do.”
