Another day, another British industrial giant tells the world it is walking away from the UK, and once again, Labour’s fingerprints are all over the wreckage.
Jim Johnson, chief executive of Hunting, one of the London Stock Exchange’s oldest listed companies, has delivered a devastating verdict on Labour’s Britain, declaring that his firm will never invest here again.
According to reporting in the Telegraph, Mr Johnson said the country’s “crazy” politics have made it impossible to trust British policymaking, and warned that Andy Burnham’s promises to rebuild British industry are dead on arrival thanks to punitive energy taxes and the kind of policy chaos investors simply won’t tolerate.
His verdict does not pull punches. He says: “The UK has become less investable than Venezuela.” Let that sink in. A 152-year-old British engineering firm, one that built fuselages and tail frames for the Lancaster Bomber and helped win the Second World War, now ranks this country’s investment climate below that of a socialist basket case propped up by oil revenues its own government cannot manage properly.
This is not a hollow threat. Hunting has already shut down 80 per cent of its UK operations over the past year, closing four of its five domestic sites, including its main Scottish base, and shedding dozens of jobs in the process. What remains is a skeleton crew: a 30-strong head office in London and a subsidiary in Newcastle.
How we got here
The rot set in when Rishi Sunak first imposed a 38 per cent windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas profits. Then Labour, true to form, could not resist making a bad situation catastrophically worse, hiking that windfall levy all the way up to 78 per cent. Add to that Ed Miliband’s ideologically driven ban on new drilling licences, dressed up as climate leadership, and you have a textbook case of a government actively strangling one of Britain’s few remaining globally competitive industries.
The result is precisely what any serious economist could have predicted: capital flight, job losses, and a generation of energy expertise packing up and leaving for friendlier shores. Mr Johnson pointed to the maddening limbo surrounding the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, both discovered more than two decades ago and still awaiting a final green light from Westminster, as exactly the kind of paralysis that scares off serious investors for good.
By contrast, he singled out Norway as the model Britain has abandoned: a country that, in his words, understands what oil and gas revenue means for a national treasury rather than treating the industry as a political punching bag.
Burnham’s fantasy industrial revival
Andy Burnham has built much of his leadership pitch around reviving British industry and manufacturing jobs. Hunting’s example exposes that ambition as wishful thinking so long as Labour keeps taxing energy producers into oblivion and refusing to approve the very projects that would create the jobs Burnham claims to want. You cannot tax an industry to the brink of collapse with one hand and promise its renaissance with the other; investors are not fooled, even if Labour’s press office thinks voters will be.
With Britain’s energy vulnerabilities laid bare by the recent Iran war, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly facing pressure to reverse course. A consultation on Rosebank’s future was expected to close this week, with the Jackdaw decision also pending. Whether Labour finally listens to the industry, or doubles down on the tax-and-ban approach that has already driven one of the Stock Exchange’s oldest companies to the exit, will say everything about whether this government is capable of learning from its own mistakes.
Britain does not have an oil and gas problem. It has a Labour problem.
The Consocialists started this attack. The Labour socialists predictably are just finishing the job. And then some of the remaining membership wonder why Badenoch won’t allow supporters of the socialist agenda to stand next time and serve as a blocking group of MPs to prevent any reversal of the suicide strategy.