Soundings: A journal of politics and culture

Could you discuss your experiences as someone who works in the sector, and tell us a bit about how Just Transition translates to on the ground activity?

It's been hard. For a long time I was involved in doing initial work with workers. Whether it's the oil and gas sector, or in other really carbon-intensive sections, this is a difficult piece of organising work, or coalition work - speaking to people and asking: what [End Page 93] are the barriers to transitioning in your workplace? In your sector? That was what framed the first bit of work that I came into, which was off the back of the Our Power report that Friends of the Earth Scotland produced with Platform, and oil and gas workers.² The report was based on a survey of workers' experiences of the sector during Covid, which got way more responses than expected, and this made us think we could do more with it than simply producing a standard report. So we did follow-up phone calls, and then in-person interviews, and then workshops with groups of workers hashing out what the demands should be - that is what created the ten demands you see in the final report. We then went back to the original 1500 or so workers in the survey, to see what they thought of them. And we asked: what things stop you from moving into renewables? Are you interested in it? What's your sense of the term Just Transition? That then formed the basis of our campaigning, and also our legitimacy - to be able to say we spoke to people and this is what they told us. It is those ten demands we've chosen to build as a campaign.

But I think the activity side of things can be hard - when Our Power came to an end, the question was what could the environmental side do in terms of campaigning? There was a bit of a crossroads. Some of these things needed to be taken up by the workers themselves, so it was a case of trying to figure out where that had happened - and I think at different points it's been easier or harder. For example, with the Keep Grangemouth Working campaign, that's a unionised workforce taking forward a campaign for a Just Transition at the refinery and making various demands, so there were easier wins for us - to slot in other support and show solidarity. Or we've done a broader piece of campaigning aimed towards the government, telling them: you need to invest, you need to take ownership and steward the transition.

We have to balance the need for sectoral-worker-led campaigning and our role within that, versus the broader field, where we're bringing the capacity to ask, for example, what it would cost to get a training plan; or to research what it would cost to upgrade manufacturing in ports. We've done coalition work with trade unions, but we do most of the mobilising for rallies. There's still things to be worked out around how we actually campaign and organise together for a Just Transition. There's so much variation between the different trade unions, and the different sectors as well, and there are different affinities with the term - or lack of affinity. That can be interesting too.

In that respect how have you found working with different trade unions? And how does the term Just Transition land with different trade unions? [End Page 94]

It's changed so much even within the two years that I've been working at Friends of the Earth. When I came in there was a bit more momentum behind Just Transition as a trade union term: 'This is ours.' 'Don't tell us what it means', etc. There was a definitely a criticism of how governments had used the term, and even at points how the climate side had used it. 'This is ours, we know what it means, we're the ones who are going to be using it and pushing for it.' Now, I would say there is much more frustration with it and a desire - not to 'can it', but to realise there's so much more to it: at the moment it so often is just warm words, it's nothing, it's jargon, it's meaningless. It's been a long time since I've heard Just Transition understood as a term born from the trade union movement in trade union spaces. That might be anecdotal, but it was striking at the STUC Congress recently, where the one fringe meeting on Just Transition was from GMB, that the main theme was that Just Transition is failing workers. Criticism is made of people just sitting with that as a language. In some ways I can understand that - and at different points the sets of interests behind that criticism are different.- We are also very critical of how the term has been weakened and made a bit useless, but we would say that's a deliberate thing, and is linked to the way private companies have interpreted it and acted on it, rather than it being a redundant way to talk about what's needed. Attitudes are really variable within unions as well - which is a different set of complications.

You said that there was a critique of the way the government use the term, but also the way the climate movement use the term. What was the distinction made between these, and unions' understanding of them?

With the government, it was that their use of the term was meaningless. 'You hear so much about the Just Transition but it doesn't translate into jobs, it doesn't translate into support.' 'We see it as something that doesn't produce anything for us.' It depends on who you speak to, and what their awareness is of where we are in the transition, but people are aware that redundancies are happening now - to give a local example Grangemouth is being shut - and it's the same for offshore and has been for quite a long time. And even in the 'positive' stories where people are making the move to renewables there is disillusion - someone we worked with on Our Power, an oil worker who has done shifts on offshore wind, has told us they've seen the same old issues of crap terms and conditions, with people chasing wages. So, for a lot of people it isn't meaning anything on the ground.

In terms of the climate movement's interpretation - and one secondary aim of the work that we've been doing has been to redress that - for many climate change campaigners it [End Page 95] was seen as always a simple question of 'we want to phase out fossil fuels and have a Just Transition'. But the critique is about what exactly that involves. What are you doing to demonstrate that you understand the specificity of that and the industrial side of things? Because, for a long time people were quite happy just campaigning on phase-out work. Or thinking somebody else was covering the industrial side or the Just Transition policies. There's been a bit of recognition that you can't talk about phasing out fossil fuels without acknowledging the transition, but that so often turned into 'listen to the workers, Just Transition now!' It felt like platitudes.

One broader issue is that because of the way that the climate movement and the climate NGO sector is at the moment, and also the regional distinctions between who works in Scotland and who works in England, we are seeing that a lot of organisations have more direct links to civil servants and to Labour. They're in there. We don't necessarily care about being in there, but we want those who are there to be saying the right things and we want them to recognise when Just Transition is being used as a platitude rather than meaningfully. If they're in there with Labour's climate team saying they'll consult workers, are they just going to say 'great - that's Just Transition ticked'? That's more of a concern for those of us who are still in the NGO space, rather than for grassroots groups, who don't care at all who's speaking to politicians and what's being said. But there is an overlap in criticism, broadly along the lines of: What do you actually mean? And what is it going to do to change things that are happening to me today?

In terms of trying to operationalise ideas of Just Transition, what sort of learning came out of the Our Power process?

Our ten demands fell into three broad categories. First, there was Our Transition, which was about the process itself. Where are workers within the transition? Are they in these cross-industry, cross-union groups facilitating things? Are you involving workers in the development of the plans? Are you paying for people to move between renewables and oil and gas in terms of standardising training qualifications?

Then there was Our Rights, which was thinking about the material conditions within the sector, whistleblowing on health and safety and other workplace issues. If people don't even feel able to say something when health and safety regulations are being broken, then what is the scope for organising and being proactive around the transition? There is also the question of extending wages and rights out to the whole UK continental shelf, because [End Page 96] we can see that non-Scottish workers, or workers who don't live in Scotland or the rest of the UK, are paid much less. Then there was a broader category, Our Energy, making the case for a permanent excess-energy-profits tax, or even for thinking about ownership of the energy system.

So we divided the demands into these three distinct but complementary categories, and then we thought about whether we wanted to take up one of the demands and make it into a campaign. Were some more suitable than others for the broader work we were doing? As an NGO, we can't do anything to protect worker's rights at work and so there are other areas for which we're better placed to be more active. In the campaign geared towards government, we picked issues that felt necessary and urgent. There was one campaign on publicly-owned wind manufacturing, and investing in job creation within that. We also had campaigns on upgrading ports and taking equity stakes, avoiding the offshoring of jobs and putting money into a proper training fund. The skills passport the government now produces is basically a careers portal, and doesn't pay anybody to retrain. When we've fully mapped out who's doing what, we can hope we're in a good space for a climate coalition to make an intervention.

However, we've had some interesting conversations recently about the variations in the coalition on issues like public ownership - which comes from a different understanding of what Just Transition can encompass. For us, or for me at least, if we don't have systematic change then we're just tinkering around the edges. When you see the issue as uprooting how the energy system is run, and addressing how trade union organising has been repressed and trade unions are weakened, what's needed to bring in a genuinely Just Transition is a big-scale thing. You can't just have a few groups of workers doing good stuff in that sector, and then maybe a publicly owned energy company that can compete with multinationals. So, on the climate side there can be differences in the vision. Sometimes everything feels urgent, it's all fast-paced - but how are we going to iron all those questions out before returning to frontline campaigning?

We're also interested in your engagement with communities and community politics - could you talk about the work in that area?

That's quite new. Last year we set up two posts in North East Scotland, specifically attached to our campaign to stop a new gas-fired power station in Peterhead (where carbon [End Page 97] capture and storage is promised 'later' in attempt at greenwashing), on the basis that there can be no new gas licenses issued if there is to be any chance of meeting government climate change commitments. We were also successful in the first stages of the Stop Rosebank Oil Field campaign, and persuaded the Scottish government to make a presumption that there would be no new oil and gas licences issued. (There has however been some concern about whether this will be embedded within energy policy and a just transition plan in the manifesto for the May 2026 election.)

But what's next? Or what's instead? In a specific site-based campaign like Peterhead Power station, in a small village like Boddam, we need a lot more community buy-in. The national campaigns on stopping power stations on climate grounds are our bread and butter. But when we try to bring that to the local community, it doesn't always land. Peterhead is an interesting area because there's so much green infrastructure being imposed there, and very little of it is up for consultation. People say, 'Everything's coming to the North East. There's substations. There's cables. There's offshore wind. You're saying you don't like this one thing? We don't see any benefit from any of it.' So I don't want to present it like everybody's against everything. But people do want to know what is it about this specific project that is problematic. If something could be better, what is it?

We're trying to be led by the people we work with who live in the North East. One colleague in Boddam has been doing a lot of work in a Save the Libraries Campaign, because that's running concurrently with the Peterhead Campaign. The local community and social infrastructure has been decimated, and trying to draw the connections between those two things is important. But what have we got to offer instead? Our colleague has been doing some film screenings and a number of cultural initiatives to bring people together. It's not that people disagree with us but they say nobody will even keep our library open and this big piece of infrastructure? That company have a lot of clout. They pay for a lot of things in the area. Why would the government not pay attention to that?

What is your take on the new Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport (ICFGF), and do Friends of the Earth Scotland have a position on that?

We support the union position. When we look at green freeports elsewhere, they've been used to undercut workers' rights. The ICFGF won't be brought about in a way that redistributes resources or wealth, it's just the same companies benefiting. The North East feels like a bit of a dumping ground for some of this infrastructure, and that plays out in [End Page 98] organising for us. If we're based in Edinburgh or Glasgow, and come up to campaign on a project, locals just think 'well, who are you?' And that's quite right. There has been a rush among climate NGOs to employ people in the North East, and in some ways that's good, but if the Central Belt then sets the tone, that's a problem. The national side of our campaign was running first, and then the local campaigning was funded later. Integrating local organising into a national campaign that is already far along - has set the terms, made arguments - that is challenging, and how to redress that is also difficult. It's interesting - because at the UK level we feel that creep from London-based NGOS, but it's the same thing in Scotland between the Central Belt and the North East.

The flipside of the local work is the national element, and we're interested in the relationship between the two. We wondered about how those dynamics of working with the Scottish government have shifted since it ended the Bute House Agreement with the Greens?

The FoES strategy for 2024-26 continues in the direction we've been going in for a while, which is that insider lobbying isn't how change is made. The organisational strategy is shifting to an emphasis on building pressure from the outside. We do less lobbying now, and that reflects the context of the government listening only tokenistically. We don't have any Scottish government funded projects. I was recently at a Friends of the Earth Europe gathering, and the question of state funding was very different there. For example there is a small group based in a small town in Belgium who are doing radical stuff - a tiny group of three staff - and they get a fairly substantial amount of Belgian state funding every year. We don't take any government money, yet our campaigning has been more 'insider' than the things that they're doing. There's nothing we have to do, and we are able to stay critical on what the government are doing. Yet we're still aiming to lobby and meet with them. There's a desire to carve out space to be in there, though this has varied across the campaigns that we do. It's an interesting internal dynamic. In some ways it's an easier question for us post-Bute House, and under Swinney particularly - because climate has vanished off the agenda. It's striking. We felt huge frustration with the Bute House Agreement, and how little of substance was achieved for transition, but at least you would see things articulated as climate policies. Under Swinney that has disappeared. We were heavily critical of the draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan 2023 at the time, and it often felt like we were chasing after things that weren't even good. But now the government are not even bothering to pretend it's happening. [End Page 99]

When it comes to marrying up that community side of things whilst not letting climate framing go, it's been important to make the argument that the community work we're doing is climate justice. When you make local government cuts you are the antithesis of the Just Transition. But the argument for framing community issues in climate language has disappeared. I don't know the reason for that. Maybe it's because of fear of the right, and the way climate change has been weaponised. There was a time when Scotland would pitch itself as a climate leader, particular under Sturgeon and with COP26. The Scottish government wanted to be seen as better than the UK. That seems to have disappeared. Even the performative parts have gone quiet.

The Tenants Union Living Rent that you're involved in has quite a different organising model to Friends of the Earth Scotland. Could you say a little bit about Living Rent's organising model?

In the five years I've been a member, it's been a neighbourhood organising model. The idea is to build branches in working-class communities based on issues that are felt within the community, but also link these to the broader housing system. The issue could be repairs or rent increases or unfair evictions - or any eviction, because there's always a reason, whether it is that tenants are not able to afford a rent increase, or that they have nowhere else to go because all housing costs are extortionate. We generally resist any eviction, or try to postpone it as much as possible. In terms of structure, we have branch committees that feed into city-wide forums where each branch is represented, and these feed into a national forum. There's still citywide organising in places like Aberdeen and Dundee, and the Highlands as well, and there's a group in Paisley, but they all aim to build a more neighbourhood perspective. There are six branches in Glasgow, and three or four in Edinburgh, though Edinburgh branches are bigger.

We've taken on campaigns at different levels. We've had a specific campaign in Partick against the local Housing Association and their sham rent consultations, and then we've also had citywide campaigns. Recently there was a campaign to try to force Glasgow City Council to implement National Planning Framework Four, which says that every new development should have 25 per cent affordable housing. But Glasgow says they meet their affordable housing targets on a citywide basis - there is no need to do it development by development. They've been resistant. We also have national campaigning on rent controls, [End Page 100] which has structured the union since the start. So you meet as a branch monthly, you build local outreach, and you have a local member defence team who take on casework. I think there are differences in how connected and how local different branches feel.

Partick usually feels very local, though it can vary depending on who comes to meetings. For a long time there was a drive to do Partick-focused campaigning, with less of a connection to the national campaigning. We're looking at our organising in the lead-up to the city AGM, because we don't have a proposal for a city campaign that we think every branch will vote for. In Dennistoun there's a community campaign around a local pool closure, whereas in Partick there isn't any concrete local campaign at the moment, so we might vote for something citywide. It's interesting how those dynamics play out, and what that means for what we work on.

You sometimes get critiques of community models because there's a fear they become disconnected from the wider political questions. What were the debates in moving to neighbourhood organising?

Those debates were a bit before my time, but I got the sense that they were about where you build the membership. Living Rent has grown in terms of paid staff who can have direction over where to do an organising drive. At the beginning, we had a group so could launch a branch. Now I think it's become more strategic. There were discussions about national versus local. This was in 2022, when we were picking our branch campaign, and there several options. One was opposing Beith Street build-to-rent flats;³ another was on the sham rent consultations, and opposing rent rises, given that the emergency rent-freeze legislation around Covid was never applied to social housing. And there was one on rats and mice. After a debate we voted on the housing association rent rise one. I think that was a good middle ground, but there was an argument made that build-to-rent is coming, and is a fork in our housing system, so it would be more significant in the long term to make an intervention there - whereas rats and mice are bad, but it's not transformative when you win. But we did campaign against Beith Street - and got it rejected once, but then the developers won their appeal.

The Beith Street campaign was dull, it was boring, and the planning system is so rigged. Other branches have taken on these campaigns against build-to-rent blocks - they get the council to reject them, but the Scottish government can supersede that and approve it. It's so demoralising. We avoided that at Beith Street, but I'm not really [End Page 101] sure why. There's a lot of intervention points for members, writing up objections, but it's also quite tiresome. There is always meant to be a dual objective in campaigning, of building the branch, getting people involved and confident to take on casework or involve themselves in actions, but with Beith Street it was less clear how to do that. So the housing association campaign felt like a happy medium, as you can have actions and negotiations with the association itself, and if we do take back some democratic control there are ways to build on that. We were trying not to lose the bigger picture of the housing system in Scotland and why it's broken. What do local campaigns do to chip away at that? Local campaigns can do that, but it takes thinking and strategy - you can feel like you're in a firefight and don't have time to think about the bigger picture.

You mentioned the rent freeze and that Scotland-wide angle. I didn't realise the rent freeze hadn't applied to the social housing sector, but I knew that when it ended it seemed to create as many issues as it had solved. I was wondering if you could say more about that and how Living Rent works at the Scottish level?

It was turned round to criticise emergency measures and argue that they don't work. The minute those regulations end, landlords are ready to put the rent up tenfold. There's a rent adjudication system - which has always existed, but now you can apply to it to decide your case - and now the cap on the percentage by which your rent can go up has ended. You could go through adjudication and come out with a worse deal than the initial rent increase. I think people expect piecemeal measures to add up to making some difference in the long run, but with housing it just snaps back like a rubber band. Where Living Rent does well is in the connection to the local level, because you have a base of communities who are fighting back successfully. I remember the cost of living crisis in summer 2022, when the rent freeze was voted down in the Scottish Parliament. We had somebody in the branch who was fighting a £200-a-month rent increase, and was served with an eviction notice when the landlord realised she wasn't going to pay. Then September came, and the Bute House Agreement, and they said there'd be a rent freeze. Okay, but if you had frozen rents three months earlier our member wouldn't have had an eviction notice. What is the recourse for her? So we always have someone to say this is how your lack of intervention directly affected people. We have that line to our membership more than any other organisation.

It's not perfect every time. For example, in our current citywide campaign against the council, we have less of those immediate links. With the campaign on 25 per cent affordable housing within developments, it was harder to bring in case studies. But to compare to [End Page 102] NGOs - they don't have that deep-rooted membership base. That's what the scramble towards community organising, even if it's NGO-ified, has represented. They have realised that you need some of that legitimacy of membership, something to demonstrate your base on an issue. For Living Rent, that's its objective, it's a tenant's union.

You touched on Living Rent operating in the Scottish specific context. Devolved governments, regardless of party, have framed themselves as progressive, working in partnership with NGOs and community organisations through consultation. What was your experience on that - and any tensions involved? And have you seen a shift under Swinney around housing, as with climate?

A lot of us talk about death by consultation, or the consultation trap. It's nightmarish in terms of the capacity it takes up, and you always feel compelled to respond because the other side are mobilised. It's draining, and I don't know if I've ever seen an outcome of a consultation that felt like it had a legitimate impact. They're consulting right now on exemptions to rent controls within the Housing Bill, and when they consulted on the first stage they sent it directly to every registered landlord in Scotland but they didn't send it to one tenant. It's so transparent. It's laughable that there's any idea that this is a participatory process.

In terms of potential shifts on housing - we also had concerns about the Greens in the Bute House Agreement period. I remember we did some local election hustings for Living Rent, and Patrick Harvie came to that and was speaking very passionately, and he was at loads of our lockdown actions. Then once the Greens were in government you couldn't get him to commit to a meeting, let alone anything else. There was a fear, however, that with the Bute House Agreement collapsing, the Housing Bill would also fall to the wayside. The union did a lot of lobbying and campaigning, arguing against dropping the Housing Bill, and in the main that hasn't happened. We haven't seen any pick-up from the Greens though. On the climate side, some Greens have become a bit more bolshy again - they'll say things on transition and Peterhead. They've come back out of hiding slightly. But I haven't seen the same for housing.

It is weird how the theme of partnership is so much emphasised, but its content is so vapid. We had a conversation with London NGOs before the last election, and they were saying that it is going to be harder campaigning under a Starmer government. I don't think we could have foreseen just how horrendous Starmer's Labour are, but we were already [End Page 103] telling people in London what it's like to be under a government for ten years that will pat you on the head and say thank you, you're really important - but ignore what you say. It's worse sometimes than coming up against outright opposition. I don't know if our advice was well-heeded, but we knew what it's like campaigning with a government who say they're on your side but aren't - even if in the end Starmer didn't even pretend to be on our side.

On that broader political context. Firstly, I'm interested in housing as something that's also being weaponised by the far right, and I wondered how Living Rent positioned themselves in relation to that? More generally, for me what has been shocking, if predictable, about Starmer is his investment in authoritarian political culture and the pushback against Palestine protests. The level of authoritarianism has been concerning, and I was wondering what your sense of that was?

It's always been something we're conscious of, but it's not been something we've faced at the day-to-day level in branch meetings. Friends of the Earth and Living Rent came together recently to hear from a researcher on how the far right are likely to play out in Scotland. She told us that far right groups are often unclear what they actually want on housing. It's not more money for public housing - and they are clear on no freebies for migrants or asylum seekers. But their stance on private rent is confusing. The researcher felt that there isn't a fully formed view. In contrast, Living Rent is for housing for everyone.⁴ Housing also links to climate change, in that communities are more likely to be flooded, or to lose their homes, in a climate catastrophe.

But we have seen evidence of authoritarianism in an increased police presence when we are campaigning. Even Friends of the Earth has seen that at, with our less confrontational activities. We're not doing the cool stuff that grassroots groups are doing in terms of disrupting infrastructure or challenging state power. We are more likely to go to hand a letter to the SSE - it's a less confrontational politics - but still there's a police presence there. We had a rally in London near the Houses of Parliament, and within forty-five minutes there were three police officers there, and they were saying 'when you're done, disperse, get out of here'. That clamping down and restricting of the space for protest is really challenging. There's something to be thought about there - the scramble towards community organising happening at the same time as the more confrontational stuff is being repressed. Our aim is to do campaigning that's less 'insider', but the space for doing disruptive, effective actions is getting harder and harsher. Perhaps the focusing on community level is a way of avoiding that? [End Page 104]