𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Yesterday, oil and gas giant BP announced it was pulling out of the North Sea after deciding it was no longer competitive. That’s huge. The FTSE 100 company has spent 60 years helping generate wealth for Britain. Now it’ll invest elsewhere. Will Miliband see that as a victory? Or will he recognise this is a disaster for Britain? Given his hatred of fossil fuels, I suspect it’ll be the former.

Miliband is no longer energy secretary but his dreadful legacy lives on. His first big move was to block new North Sea drilling, then drag his feet over the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields. He also hiked the Energy Profits Levy from 25% to 38%, imposing an effective tax rate of 78% on North Sea producers. Plus he extended the levy by five years to 2030 and scrapped a valuable investment allowance. Miliband engineered BP’s exit. And now it’s gone.

Keir Starmer tried to rein Miliband in, but failed. New PM Andy Burnham has shifted him to the foreign office, and allowed rumours to grow that he’ll finally greenlight Rosebank and Jackdaw. That decision now rests with new energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, who’s as big a net zero nutter as Miliband. She’s hinted at a more pragmatic approach to the North Sea, but so far, we’ve seen no approach at all. And BP wasn’t hanging around.

Burnham is on holiday. While he puts his trotters up, one of Britain’s biggest companies has given up on us. Averting BP’s exit strikes me as a bigger priority than posting a TikTok video, but I’m old fashioned. BP boss Meg O’Neill did manage to speak to Burnham before he flew off, urging him to back Britain’s fossil fuel industry.

She reminded him that Britain still gets around 75% of its energy from oil and gas. It therefore makes sense to produce as much of it ourselves as we can, to fund the green transition. Miliband’s drilling ban was purely performative politics, to please the left. We still use fossil fuels, just buy even more of them from abroad.

That won’t save the planet. It’ll actually increase emissions as we ship liquefied natural gas from the US and Qatar, while destroying home-grown jobs, tax revenues, energy security and the balance of payments. It could add £165billion to the UK economy. Miliband doesn’t care.

This raises an even bigger threat. There’s been constant speculation that BP may shift its stock market listing from London to New York. It’s the UK’s 10th biggest company at £80billion, so that’s a big deal. Rival Shell also has one eye on Wall Street. If BP leaves, it could follow. Shell is our second biggest company at £185billion, so that’s an even bigger deal. Miliband’s ideological assault and Burnham’s drift could tip them over.

And it’s not just oil companies. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca was left fuming after Keir Starmer failed to back its expansion plans. It’s now eyeing a tie-up with a US firm that could take it to New York too. AstraZeneca is our fourth biggest company, worth £181billion. We can’t afford to lose it.

Here’s a fact to wake Burnham out of his slumbers. The number of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange has plunged from 2,365 in 2015 to around 1,530 today. A third have gone in 10 years due to delistings, takeovers and a lack of new IPOs. We’re already on the brink. To lose three of our top 10 companies would be a national disaster. Game over for the City of London, basically.

While Burnham slaps on the sun cream, Britain’s corporate crown jewels are eyeing foreign shores away and we’re all getting poorer.

I wonder what Miliband thinks of that. He might even be delighted. This is the man who called BP’s profits “morally and economically wrong”, because they were boosted by the Iran war. How Labour intends to fund its spending plans after driving away the very companies it wants to tax probably hasn’t crossed his fuzzy little mind.