A question for Nigel Farage – why is your nationalist party so obsessed with destroying British jobs?
Monbiot says Reform UK and the Conservatives are attacking the net zero economy despite its job growth and bigger employment base than oil and gas.
Intelligence analysis by GPT-5.4 Mini
The piece argues that Britain’s net zero economy is already much larger, in jobs and value, than oil and gas, and that attacks from Reform UK and the Conservatives are economically reckless. Monbiot says the politics may sound pro-worker, but the numbers point the other way.
Monbiot says Britain is trying to protect a shrinking old engine, oil and gas, while attacking a bigger new engine, clean energy jobs. It is like arguing over a bicycle when the real transport is already a bus full of workers.
Analysis
The jobs argument
Monbiot’s central claim is that the clean-energy transition is not a threat to work in Britain; it is one of the biggest sources of it. He cites Confederation of British Industry figures saying the net zero economy directly employs more than 300,000 full-time workers and supports 1.1 million jobs. He adds that the sector is already worth about £100bn and could grow much larger.
Fossil fuels versus clean energy
Against that, he says the UK oil and gas industry is much smaller as an employer. In 2023 it directly provided 27,500 jobs and supported 205,000 in total, while having lost 70,000 jobs between 2016 and 2023. He also points to the Rosebank field as an example of how little employment new extraction would bring, saying it would create only 255 jobs over its lifetime if approved.
Politics and investment risk
The article argues that Reform UK and the Conservatives are presenting themselves as defenders of practical workers while actually undermining the industries most likely to employ them. Monbiot says Reform has threatened renewable-energy contracts and that this kind of language could scare off investors by making policy look unstable.
Long-term direction
He also says the North Sea’s decline is largely geological, not political. Even with more licences, he writes that UK gas output is expected to fall sharply by 2050, and that new licensing changes the overall trajectory only slightly because so little remains to be extracted. The broader point is that the future job base, in his view, is more likely to come from renewables, advanced manufacturing, and transition jobs than from a shrinking fossil-fuel sector.
Key points
- Monbiot says the net zero economy already employs far more people than oil and gas.
- He cites CBI figures showing more than 300,000 direct net zero jobs and 1.1 million supported jobs.
- The article says UK oil and gas employment has fallen sharply and new projects create relatively few jobs.
- Reform UK is accused of threatening renewable contracts and discouraging investment.
- The piece argues that Britain’s future work is more likely to come from clean energy than from fossil fuels.
If the green-energy plan stays on track, the article says it could create hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially for people leaving fossil fuels, school leavers, veterans, ex-offenders, and the unemployed. Training centres and colleges in deindustrialised areas could help spread those jobs to places that need them most.
If Reform-style politics shape policy, the article says Britain could lose up to 500,000 jobs within three years of a Reform government, rising to 1.4 million by 2040. It could also damage investor confidence by threatening contracts and creating uncertainty around the net zero economy.
