Another hole has been punched in the leftist promise of a so-called “green jobs revolution”, as wind turbine manufacturing jobs are sent to Communist-run China and the Middle East.
Local manufacturing firm BiFab, located just miles from the enormous Seagreen offshore wind project, has not been awarded any of the work on the expensive turbines for Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), with 84 of 114 required being awarded to a Chinese yard and 30 to a firm based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“We are extremely disappointed that the developers have chosen to exclude Scottish yards from any fabrication contracts,” said DF Barnes, which owns BiFab along with the Scottish Government, in comments reported by The Press and Journal.
“Since acquiring BiFab, we have been trying exceptionally hard to get people back to work in our yards.
“Instead, Scottish and Southern Energy, in the face of what could be one of the worst recessions in modern history, has chosen to give all the fabrication work for one of the largest offshore windfarm projects in the world to companies in China and the UAE,” they lamented.
Hazel Nolan, a spokesman for the GMB workers’ union, was even more robust: “We warn industry majors like SSE and the governments at Holyrood and Westminster that constant disappointment is now turning to growing anger – our communities dependent on offshore wind fabrication contracts are being totally failed, and so is the country,” she said.
“The public have been consistently lied to for the last decade over the prospects for green jobs in Scotland and across the rest of the UK, from the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’ to the ‘green jobs revolution’, while the bulk of the manufacturing contracts are awarded to anywhere but here,” the official added bitterly.
“Scraps off the table from our own offshore wind sector is bad enough but when billion-pound fabrication contracts are wholly completed abroad and then shipped to the waters off Scotland, you know that any credible prospects for a green economic recovery are sailing by.”
Responding, SSE claimed that “We wanted nothing more than to award work to a Scottish firm that would help set them up for future success.”
“Unfortunately,” they added, “on this occasion, the gap between BiFab’s offering and that of competing fabricators was too significant to close” — highlighting, if inadvertently, the issue with free trade and competition between Western industry and sweatshop economies with dictatorial regimes.
This is an issue U.S. President Donald Trump has to an extent successfully tackled through import tariffs on countries like China — although this he has been denounced as a “protectionist” and “populist” both by left-liberals and many establishment “conservatives” who believe that near-untrammelled global trade is an essential ingredient for free market capitalism for doing so.