This Is Why I Can’t Listen to Politicians Anymore

The Trick Inside the Sentence

Burnham’s first premise is not wrong.

Britain will not eliminate every use of oil and gas tomorrow. Fossil fuels remain embedded in transport, heating, chemicals, plastics, construction materials, aviation, shipping and industrial production. Any serious transition must acknowledge that reality and protect the workers and communities whose livelihoods remain connected to those industries.

But acknowledging continuing demand does not establish the need to accelerate new extraction.

That is the trick inside Burnham’s sentence.

Those statements are placed beside one another, but Burnham has not demonstrated the mechanism connecting them.

People are struggling. Britain has oil. Therefore, extracting more oil will help struggling people.

How?

North Sea oil is traded internationally. It is not reserved for British households, and it does not arrive at British petrol stations carrying a patriotic discount. Increasing production in one declining basin is not enough to determine the international price.

A resource being underneath the British continental shelf does not mean the British public owns the companies extracting it, controls where it is sold or determines its price.

Burnham’s language creates the emotional impression of collective ownership where little collective ownership actually exists.

Rosebank and Jackdaw

The two projects at the centre of the current argument are Rosebank and Jackdaw.

Rosebank—not “Red Door”, as I first remembered it—is a predominantly oil development approximately 80 miles north-west of Shetland. It is one of the largest remaining undeveloped discoveries in UK waters.

Jackdaw is principally a gas development in the central North Sea, east of Aberdeen.

Their ownership tells us something important about the fiction of “our energy”.

Both projects are now principally controlled through Adura, the offshore joint venture created by Shell and Equinor. Rosebank is 80% held through Adura, while the remaining 20% is held by Ithaca Energy.

Equinor is majority-owned by the Norwegian state. Ithaca Energy is majority-owned by Israel’s Delek Group. Shell is a multinational company whose shareholders are spread around the world.

There is nothing automatically illegitimate about international ownership. The point is that politicians cannot talk as though location and ownership are the same thing.

Rosebank is situated in UK waters. That does not mean its profits automatically belong to the British public.

In fact, Norway has managed to position itself on both sides of Britain’s failure. Britain imports Norwegian energy, while a Norwegian state-backed company can profit from extracting oil situated beneath the British continental shelf.

Norway maintained substantial public involvement in its petroleum sector and built a sovereign wealth fund now worth well over a trillion pounds. Britain privatised its national oil company, spent much of its earlier revenue as it arrived and never established a comparable permanent national fund.

Now Burnham wants to tell us that accelerating extraction will allow “us” to pay for the transition.

Norway has a mechanism through which oil wealth becomes public wealth.

Where is ours?

Follow the Jobs

Supporters of Rosebank and Jackdaw repeatedly mention employment, and employment matters. Britain has already destroyed too many industrial communities without credible replacement work. North Sea workers should not be treated as disposable collateral in another badly managed transition.

But the numbers still require scrutiny.

Adura says Rosebank would support an average of approximately 525 UK-based full-time jobs over its lifetime. That is meaningful employment for the people receiving it, but it is not a national industrial revolution.

Documents relating to Jackdaw reportedly identify only 27 direct full-time jobs specific to the development. Adura presents a wider estimate of roughly 500 jobs annually once indirect and supporting employment is included, although much of that work would be attached to existing infrastructure rather than located directly on Jackdaw.

Again, those jobs matter. But we must distinguish between direct permanent employment, temporary construction work, supply-chain activity and broad economic modelling.

Every large development is presented using the biggest available employment figure. Once the figures are opened, we often discover that only a small proportion represents permanent work created directly by the project.

If Burnham wants to defend these developments on employment grounds, he should publish a transparent breakdown:

• How many construction jobs will be created?
• How long will they last?
• How many permanent positions will exist?
• How many jobs are genuinely additional?
• How many roles are being transferred from existing projects?
• How many workers will be guaranteed retraining into offshore wind, grid infrastructure, decommissioning and other future industries?
• How much of the engineering, fabrication and supply-chain work will remain in Britain?

That would be a serious industrial argument.

Simply saying “jobs” is not enough.

Even BP Is Selling Up

There is something almost surreal about hearing politicians speak of a new North Sea future while BP is preparing to sell its British North Sea production business.

BP—formerly British Petroleum—has operated in the region for more than 60 years. It has now placed its North Sea oil and gas portfolio on the market as part of a wider effort to concentrate investment on what it considers its highest-value opportunities.

The company believes its North Sea business would be “better positioned as part of another company”.

Think about that.

The company historically associated more than any other with British oil has concluded that its capital may produce better returns elsewhere. The portfolio represents only about 5% of BP’s global oil and gas output and could reportedly sell for somewhere around $2 billion to $2.6 billion.

BP is not completely leaving Britain. It intends to retain its petrol stations, aviation-fuel distribution, trading operation and London headquarters. It is the upstream extraction business—the difficult, declining and capital-intensive part—that it wants to sell.

BP is making a commercial decision.

Burnham is supplying the national mythology.

If the North Sea represents such an extraordinary engine for Britain’s future, why are so many major companies selling, merging, reducing or reorganising their exposure to it?

Shell and Equinor placed their UK offshore assets into Adura. BP is looking for a buyer. ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, TotalEnergies and Eni have all sold, merged, spun off or reduced elements of their involvement in the ageing basin.

This does not mean the North Sea has no remaining economic value. It means the easy political story bears little resemblance to the commercial reality.

The basin is mature. Production has declined sharply. Remaining developments can be expensive and complex. Decommissioning liabilities are enormous. Companies will stay where the expected returns justify the risks and leave when better opportunities exist elsewhere.

That is capitalism.

So why does Burnham describe it as though it were a collective national mission?

What Happened to All the Licences?

There is another question nobody seems willing to ask.

Where are all the licences we have already issued?

Between 2010 and 2024, Conservative-led governments awarded hundreds of North Sea oil and gas licences across seven licensing rounds.

The 33rd licensing round alone, opened under Liz Truss in October 2022, resulted in 82 licence offers to 50 companies, covering hundreds of offshore blocks and part-blocks.

These announcements were presented as evidence that Britain was securing its energy future.

So where is it?

The answer is that an exploration licence is not the same thing as an operating oilfield.

It gives a company rights over a defined area and allows it to begin exploring what might be commercially recoverable. A licence does not guarantee that a discovery will be made. A discovery does not guarantee that extraction will be commercially viable. Commercial viability does not guarantee final development consent. And even an approved development can take years before producing anything.

Governments announce licences because licences are immediate and politically useful. Production is uncertain, expensive and often many years away.

The North Sea Transition Authority estimated that the 82 offers from the 33rd round could eventually add about 600 million barrels of oil equivalent by 2060. But “could” is doing enormous work in that sentence.

Research commissioned by the campaign organisation Uplift and conducted with energy consultancy Voar examined the hundreds of licences issued under Conservative governments between 2010 and 2024. It concluded that the seven licensing rounds led to only 20 new or relicensed field developments.

According to that analysis, those developments have so far produced the equivalent of approximately 36 days of current UK gas demand. Across their entire projected lifetimes, they could collectively produce less than six months of current gas demand and less than eight months of current oil demand.

Those comparisons are based on present consumption and come from an organisation campaigning against new development, so they should be understood in that context. But they expose an essential truth: hundreds of licences do not equal hundreds of producing fields, and they certainly do not equal energy independence.

The announcements were bigger than the material outcome.

We have been through this before. The licences were issued. The headlines were printed. Politicians told us Britain was “unleashing” the North Sea.

Now another prime minister appears and tells us accelerated extraction could become the bridge to our clean-energy future.

Why should we believe the same promise again?

Who Carries the Risk?

The ownership question becomes even more important when tax relief enters the picture.

Oil and gas companies pay substantial headline tax rates on North Sea profits, including corporation tax, the supplementary charge and the Energy Profits Levy. The industry therefore argues that new production generates valuable revenue for the Treasury.

That is part of the picture.

The other part is the collection of investment allowances, reliefs, deductible expenditure and decommissioning costs built into the fiscal regime.

Campaigners have estimated that Rosebank could benefit from several billion pounds of tax relief over its development. The precise outcome will depend on future prices, costs, production and the tax regime operating across the field’s lifetime, and industry representatives dispute claims that this constitutes a direct public subsidy.

But the central question remains legitimate.

Britain has repeatedly socialised risk while leaving ownership and control in private hands.

Companies receive licences, investment incentives and deductible development costs. If a project succeeds, profits flow through corporate ownership structures. If the basin declines, the public still faces the economic consequences for workers and communities, alongside eventual decommissioning and environmental responsibilities.

Then politicians point at the resource and call it “ours”.

A Bridge to Where?

Burnham says accelerated extraction could become a bridge to clean energy.

But a bridge requires two fixed points and a planned route between them.

What prevents oil companies from distributing the profits while Britain is left with another promise of a transition that never arrives?

Without those details, the bridge is just a metaphor.

Worse, accelerating extraction can compete with the transition for skilled workers, engineering capacity, political attention and investment. The companies involved are not automatically using their North Sea profits to replace themselves with publicly owned clean energy.

The word “transition” makes the policy sound temporary, managed and purposeful. But new fossil-fuel infrastructure is built to operate for decades. Rosebank’s production could extend towards 2050—the very year Britain is supposed to reach net zero.

At what point does the bridge end?

The Hope Meets the System

This matters to me because I wanted Burnham to represent a break from precisely this kind of politics.

I wanted someone capable of speaking plainly about ownership, control and who ultimately benefits. I wanted a prime minister willing to explain why Britain can possess valuable resources while its people remain exposed to international prices and corporate decisions.

But I knew he wouldn’t.

Perhaps I knew he couldn’t.

The British political system does not merely replace politicians. It absorbs them.

A new leader arrives with a different biography, warmer language and promises of renewal. Then the same institutions, markets, advisers, newspapers, lobbyists, foreign governments and corporate interests begin closing around them.

Before long, hope is being translated into “pragmatism”.

And pragmatism nearly always seems to mean leaving concentrated power exactly where it is.

Burnham spoke to Donald Trump and indicated that he would take a pragmatic approach to the North Sea. Trump immediately claimed Britain would open the basin “all the way”.

Burnham now needs to satisfy several audiences at once.

Every audience is given a phrase it can hold.

But a collection of carefully balanced phrases is not the same thing as a coherent policy.

And What Happened to Starmer?

There is something else I cannot ignore.

Has anyone noticed how completely Keir Starmer appears to have been erased?

Two years in government, and suddenly it is as though he did nothing. As though Britain did not lose another two years waiting for change that never properly arrived. As though the entire period can disappear behind another leadership change, another reset and another invitation to hope.

This is not really about Starmer’s personality. It is about the political system’s lack of memory and accountability.

A leader is promoted as the answer. Time passes. Expectations collapse. The leader disappears. The country is then invited to begin emotionally from zero with the next person.

There is no serious accounting of the time wasted.

No accounting of the promises abandoned.

No accounting of the structural problems left untouched.

The face changes, and Britain is encouraged to feel hopeful all over again.

That is why I increasingly struggle to listen.

I can examine a policy. I can follow ownership, contracts, licences, taxation and regulation. What I cannot keep doing is investing emotionally in political language that repeatedly dissolves when placed against material reality.