The Grangemouth Scandal

The Job Cuts At Grangemouth Reveal The Fraudulent Nature Of The Unite and SNP Leaders

For two political parties that supposedly hate each other the Labour Party and the SNP certainly are agreeing on a lot these days. They agree on the need to continue the Ukraine war in perpetuity and they apparently agree that the number one priority of the governments in London and Edinburgh is to support asset strippers such as Jim Ratcliffe of Ineos. It is that company which is the co-owner (along with a Chinese company) of Petro-Ineos which operates the Grangemouth oil refinery where at least 500 jobs are now at risk due to part of the plant being threatened with closure. When this was announced by the company last year there was a storm of protest from Unite leadership in the form of Sharon Graham and Scottish Unite secretary Derek Thomson about how this was unacceptable or “inexplicable” and that they would fight the company over this. The first stories about the job cuts at Grangemouth emerged almost a year ago and in all that time what have the Unite leadership actually done? There are a lot of words, denunciations and verbal gymnastics from the likes of Sharon Graham but has been done concretely about this? There has been no ballot of the Grangemouth workers for strike action. There appears to have been no agitation to even build support for such a ballot. There was a strike ballot held at Grangemouth over pay by Unite in 2023 but nothing over the loss of at  least 500 jobs? Why is that? Given that Grangemouth workers hold a considerable amount of industrial power in their hands as they keep Scotland supplied with petrol in their role as the only oil refinery there then why not use that power? Surely the most obvious step to take is to mobilise the workers to defend their jobs and be ready for a battle against Ineos, Swinneys SNP and Starmers Labour Party all of whom are working together it seems to gut Grangemouth. The fact that the British government has loaned Ineos £600 million to develop refinery facilities in Belgium whilst cutting jobs at Grangemouth should cause a major scandal that the entire union movement mobilises around. Why is the government paying a company to deindustrialise part of Britain which already suffers from large amounts of economic inactivity? The most baffling thing about all of this is the sheer inactivity of Unite itself though. After all, Sharon Graham came into office four years ago promising to be all about fighting to preserve jobs, pay and conditions. So given that it has now been almost a year since this was first mooted, Unite has done nothing we can only conclude that the Unite leadership is complicit with these job cuts. It seems to us that, yet again, the Unite leadership is doing the bidding of the labour party who (in turn) are collaborating with Ineos to make these job cuts get pushed through with minimal resistance. And what of John Swinney’s SNP administration in Edinburgh? Why on earth would a party who are (supposedly) dedicated to having Scotland leave Britain be willing to overlook the further deindustrialisation of that country? The truth is that the SNP are merely a group of employees of the British ruling class the exact same way that the labour party is. Their job is to police dissent in Scotland and make sure it is channeled into areas that the British ruling class find acceptable. The SNP leaders have shown their willingness to back the slaughter in Ukraine and now they back the asset stripping of the country they supposedly want to rule over. They follow the orders that come from London and it reveals a certain wretched truth about devolution in Scotland, Wales and the English regions and that is that this was never about reviving these areas but about ridding the London government of the responsibility of managing the decline of these areas. This was a plan first outlined in secret by the Thatcher government in the early 1980s with regard to places like Liverpool which were being deindustrialised. It came to fruition under the Blair administration dressed up as devolution, so the job of clowns like John Swinney is to oversee the effective destruction of the area he supposedly wants to see become independent. His job is to be a regional manager for the British ruling class and he has no more interest in fighting for working class Scots than Keir Starmer has.

Why is it the case that after a year of these job losses being talked about there has been no action from Unite? Why has the SNP government done absolutely nothing? Why has the Scottish Trades Union Congress done nothing? Why have the only demonstrations outside of Grangemouth been held not by any trade union but only by the Alba Party (founded by the late Alex Salmond)? 

The truth is that whether we are talking about the Unite leadership or the labour party or the SNP all of these structures are designed to police working class actions and make sure that nothing happens which could possibly challenge the rule of capital. If capital demands the close of Grangemouth then it is the job of their political and industrial servants to carry this out whilst lying to the working class and actively looking to prevent any mobilisation against it. The reality is that if you are prepared to act as a policeman for the British ruling class against the working class then you will have a well remunerated career with a large expense account attached to it. Defy the ruling class and only prison awaits you and that is a bargain that the union leaders, Scottish and Welsh nationalists and most of the left have taken. 

The demand should be made across Britain for the full nationalisation of the petro-chemical industries starting with Grangemouth as it is clear that the private owners have no intention to invest in it. The demand should be made to both the Edinburgh and London governments by the trade unions. If private owners say it is not profitable enough to keep a facility open then it should be taken off them with no compensation to be paid to these parasites. If the Unite leadership were remotely serious then they would make that demand and mobilise the workers at Grangemouth and the entire oil industry in support of it. If the SNP leadership were remotely serious then they would act to nationalise Grangemouth and dare Starmer to try and stop them. Neither will though and it is high time that the working class saw through these con artists who are collaborating with the ruling class in order to enable our class enemy to make war on us.