The North Sea oil industry has decided to prematurely phase itself out with the aid of gravity and a slippery winch.

Claire Coutinho must be experiencing a deeply conflicted sense of vindication. Back in July 2024, the then-Shadow Energy Secretary stood in the Commons to warn that Labour’s £8 billion GB Energy project was a bureaucratic mirage that "will not touch the sides" of replacing our reliance on North Sea oil.

Naturally, this prophecy was cheerfully ignored by a government intoxicated by its own net zero rhetoric. But two years later, Coutinho’s warning is being stress-tested by an entirely unlegislated force: staggering industrial incompetence.

As Andy Burnham spends his first week in Number 10 assuring Laura Kuenssberg that he is "hitting the ground running," operations at Rosebank—Britain’s largest undeveloped oilfield—have ground to a halt. Why? Because someone accidentally dropped their drilling equipment into the sea.

Labour assumed they would have time to smoothly transition away from fossil fuels while their state-owned energy company found its feet. Instead, the North Sea oil industry has decided to prematurely phase itself out with the aid of gravity and a slippery winch. Coutinho warned that prematurely throttling our oil supply would leave Britain exposed; she simply failed to predict that the industry would do it themselves.

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