Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB, represents a contradiction at the heart of contemporary British trade unionism: a legitimate and often powerful critique of deindustrialisation sits uneasily alongside a reactionary energy politics that blunts its class edge. Smith interviewed in this weeks NS is right to rage against decades of economic abandonment, but his stance on net zero, however framed, risks ceding ground to fossil capital and playing into Farage’s cynical, nationalist culture war.
“We’ve been exporting jobs and importing virtue.”
This line, delivered with Smith’s usual rhetorical punch, crystallises a widely shared sentiment in Britain’s post-industrial heartlands: that green policy is for the rich, and decarbonisation is done to workers, not with them. But the implication that climate action is merely an elite performance disguises a more serious tension: the refusal of British governments (Labour and Tory alike) to plan, nationalise, and invest in a just transition.
Decarbonisation Without Class: A False Choice
Smith insists that he is not a climate denier, and one believes him. But the repeated refrain that “oil and gas is not the enemy” fails to reckon with the reality of ecological breakdown. The enemy is not the worker on the rig or the engineer at Grangemouth; it is the social relation that makes climate catastrophe the price of short-term profit. Smith correctly identifies that the UK “decarbonised through deindustrialisation” exporting carbon and importing cheap goods, but his solution is to reverse the outsourcing of extraction, rather than break with the fossil economy entirely.
What Smith does not say is that any serious green transition. One that centres workers, unions, and public ownership, has been politically sabotaged from the start. The Labour leadership’s refusal to commit to public control of renewables, their backtracking on green investment, and their capitulation to bond markets are the real betrayals. Yet Smith reserves most of his fire for Ed Miliband and environmental policy, not Rachel Reeves and fiscal orthodoxy.
“We should be talking about North Sea Two.”
A soundbite, but a misfire. If Labour’s energy policy lacks clarity, Smith’s alternative is a fantasy of green oil. A belief that North Sea extraction can be rebranded as transition, so long as it’s taxed and unionised. It’s not a plan. It’s a managed decline of ambition.
The Real Virtue-Signalling Comes from Capital
Smith is right to raise the anti-union practices of supposedly “green” companies like Octopus and SeaAH Wind. These are not marginal concerns. The new green capital is often as hostile to labour as the old fossil firms. The solution, however, is not to slow down the transition. It is to restructure it from below. A net zero politics worthy of the name would be:
- based on public ownership of energy infrastructure
- delivering universal decarbonised housing and green transport
- built through planning, union democracy, and jobs guarantees
- and funded by taxing capital not appeasing it.
Instead, we are presented with a false binary: either anti-worker decarbonisation or pro-worker fossil continuity. This logic leads directly into the arms of Farage and Trump – who are only too happy to frame climate action as elitist warfare on the working class.
The Politics of Decline
“People just look beat.”
Smith’s description of British towns is apt and affecting. But his emphasis on energy security as the key to renewal leans towards a conservative politics of decline management, not socialist transformation. His admiration for aspects of the US New Right. Their ability to channel working-class anger. Should be a warning. Reaction always flourishes where the left offers only paternalism and confusion.
There is a better path. But it demands that the unions go beyond defensive corporatism and fossil nostalgia. It demands a national programme (not just a mission) that links environmental survival with economic justice, and makes the fight against climate breakdown a fight for working-class power.
A trade unionism that avoids the existential challenge of climate breakdown will, in the end, be no match for the next round of crisis. Smith may dismiss the “fashionable” Green New Deal crowd, but it is they (not fossil-friendly unionists nor technocratic Labour centrists) who are asking the right questions: who owns the transition, who controls the surplus, and who decides what gets built?
Until the GMB and Labour can answer that, Farage’s phoney solidarity will continue to fill the vacuum.