Interview: Ewan Gibbs

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What do you research?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

My name is Ewan Gibbs, I’m a lecturer in economic and social history at Glasgow University and my research is about labour, work, energy and industry. My research is largely focused on workplace politics and protests in energy sectors, primarily looking at Scotland in the twentieth century, increasingly looking at Britain as a whole, and I'm also thinking about energy and workplace politics in the twenty-first century, including transition to renewable energy in my research as well. My background was in researching deindustrialisation in the Scottish coalfields, so I have a long experience of the end of coal mining employment across the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, I’ve been working on a larger project on experiences of energy transition in light of the current discussion of the transition to green energy and have been thinking about Britain’s experiences of several energy transitions since the end of the Second World War, looking at the areas and local authorities that were most impacted by those upheavals.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How did you start in that research? What brought you to it?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

Slightly convoluted answer, but I guess that I started doing this research because I was interested in what happened to the industrial working class. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the poll tax protest movement in the late 80s and early 1990s in Glasgow — I don’t need to go into the details of that particular set of events — but one of the standout features of it was this was a set of protests that were marked by the involvement of unemployed young men in particular. I thought this was a very interesting pattern, that all previous movements of their size and character in Scotland in the twentieth century had substantive workplace and industrial action behind them. That drew me to studying the miners, because of the size of the coal sector as an employer, especially of men, and because in the early twentieth century, the miners had been at the centre of not just the coalfield in its politics, but a larger working class in national politics in Scotland and Britain. And so, I was interested in looking at that long process of economic change. What began as a study of working-class experiences of economic changes, associated shifts in culture and the organisation of society became a study about forms of energy as well.

Obviously, I knew that coal was a form of energy, but studying the process of colliery closures revealed that this was also a story about power stations and a story about political decisions over what fuel sources Britain was going to rely on. And that had profound impacts for the organisation of employment for particular local economies, but also for what the national economy looked like. That was what attracted me to studying my current project.

I increasingly think that the way that energy production is organised is absolutely central to the conditions of workers, and also to the quality of or form of democracy that we enjoy or don’t enjoy, as it may be. Who owns and controls and has influence over energy supplies is absolutely central. That is particularly important in the current debate over the green transition. It’s crucial, too, to incorporate the green energy transition within important frameworks about political economy and class struggle.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Why study deindustrialisation? (Why) does it matter that we understand deindustrialisation correctly? What are the stakes involved?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

I think firstly it matters because deindustrialisation is the central economic experience of the British economy since the end of the Second World War; from an economy where something like approaching 50 per cent of the population were employed in industrial and industrially adjacent activities (often you only get given the figures for manufacturing in these discussions)  but if you incorporate mining and the railways or utilities, and a lot of other work in electricity, water supply, which we could consider as industrial adjacent activities, you’re looking at a really big portion of economic production and of employment and that structured everyday life and politics. It’s not an accident that the peak support of the Labour Party was registered at the point in time when Britain was a recognisably industrial society and that important markers of social progress were achieved in some ways over the 50s and the 60s into the 1970s in terms of rates of economic inequality, distribution of wealth, and the growth of trade unions and their power and influence.

On the other hand, I think it is important because I don’t think we should essentialise industrial societies. Industrial societies were in many ways quite awful places to live in the nineteenth century before they were improved by the collective action of workers. But also, the way that the industrialisation came about in terms of how it was experienced has been very different in different countries, and it’s been very different at different points in time. In many respects in the 1980s and 1990s economic achievements from the 1960s and 1970s were reversed. And that’s because deindustrialisation was managed in a way which was relatively beneficial from the point of view of economic security and worker standing in society in the 60s and 70s. It was often managed disastrously in the 1980s and 1990s; it was managed as part of a political project of negatively redistributing wealth and power.

I think it’s very important that we understand that because we’re now having a discussion about how we shape the economy once again. Deindustrialisation was going to happen in some form, the real struggle was about how it was adapted to change and I think similarly, a transition to green energy is going to happen, it already is happening. Now, the pace of that will differ and the extent will differ but the other key question is of what that looks like and what parts of society are going to benefit from it, and who's going to lose from it as well. These are really important questions.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is missing from that standard story of deindustrialisation, historiographically but also, in public memory, where it becomes newsreels of the miners' strikes?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

Deindustrialisation firstly is misunderstood in temporal terms. It’s considered something that happened in the 1980s and 1990s: the iconic films are things like Brassed Off, Billy Elliot, and The Full Monty, aren’t they? And they cover the period 1984 to some point in the late 90s at which point the steel and coal industries have more or less disappeared from the social landscape. I think the fact that deindustrialisation was occurring in Britain from the mid 1950s is missing. Manufacturing employment peaked in the late 60s, so you have a period where manufacturing employment was still expanding, but industries like coal and dock work and the railways were losing labour. Industries that had traditionally employed large numbers of women like cotton textiles and jute were contracting too. But from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, you have a general deindustrialisation across manufacturing regions.

Rather than understanding deindustrialisation as a longer secular process, it is reduced to that period of mass unemployment and hardship in the 1980s and 1990s, which also then means we understand that period too. Further, the miners’ strike was provoked in no small part because of the forms of protection that had been applied in previous colliery closures won by trade unions, and in the context of the availability of jobs in other industries. These measures were taken away, and that was big part of why I refer to the “moral economy”, borrowing from EP Thompson, and that the moral economy was a big part of the reason that the strike happened, as well as the extent of job losses that were being inflicted on the coalfields by the Thatcher government.

I think the other really important point is that the way that deindustrialisation has been remembered is primarily through heavy industries in the north of England, and perhaps the West of Scotland and the south of Wales as well. But London was the largest industrial city in Britain at the start of the twentieth century. And the experiences of women workers and Black and Asian workers need to be accounted for in assessments of economic changes that they were central to. We can think about the workforces in Birmingham as well, the car factories or elsewhere, you will have, again, diverse workforces. So, I think that largely because of how deindustrialisation has been remembered, especially in the context of the Brexit debate in England about what deindustrialisation means, who the traditional working class are, or how the debate has basically allowed class to be turned into region really, and be defined by not living in a cosmopolitan or metropolitan context.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

From the present, it seems inevitable that deindustrialisation was going to happen, although, as you say, the way in which it would be managed was up for grabs, but I wonder how it looked as it was happening? What were the responses people had to it? How did they imagine what would happen next? Was there a feeling that things could be entirely different?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

Before the 1980s, the common sense in industrialised areas, and particularly among workers, was still shaped by the sensibilities of living in an industrial society I think there was a sense that industrial employment would continue, and especially that it could be fought for, and had, on occasion, been successfully fought for. Well into the 1980s, energy trade unionists put forward plans for the coal-fired economy of the twenty-first century. We laugh at that now for two reasons: firstly, that didn’t happen. The dash for gas happened, and coal was imported from around the world to replace British-mined coal. Secondly, it’s not environmentally sustainable and we very much know that. But this was at a time before then: a period of very high oil prices, a period of energy supply instability, a period where organised labour was still strong, and a period where environmental concern was more concern about the O-Zone layer than carbon emissions. That plan was about supplies for combined heat and power which were a more efficient municipally-owned system. I don’t think that’s quite post-industrial, but there’s also a sense that industry doesn’t have to be about economic growth numbers, that industry could actually be used for localised economic purposes.

British workers in certain circumstances put forward alternative economic plans, and one of the most famous examples was at Lucas Aerospace — a giant aerospace manufacturing company in the 1970s that was about to embark on a huge raft of redundancies. Interestingly, both manual and non-manual workers were involved in this. Workers came up with alternative uses of their skills with great creativity, and one of the proposals was for making wind turbines.

There is very much a sense that industry could be used and employed in different ways as well as just saved, particularly in relation to energy.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Yes, an assumption that it is possible to redirect industry for some agreed-on political goal as well as retaining jobs.

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

I think that there is that sense by the late twentieth century, a lot of these industrial workers — who have strong occupational identities — think their scarce skills are what makes them useful and they act with hostility if those are denigrated, but that also comes with confidence, and on occasion, being able to envision a totally different way of organising society which is grounded in the day-to-day activity in lives that are comparatively self-organised or self-regulating.

This points also to the relative integration of employment, social life and culture, which has negatives as well as positives attached to it. And there are lots of important discussions going on within philosophy and journalism including writers like Sarah Jaffe, who have contributed important ideas about where work should stand in our lives, how important it should be and how integrated with our sense of self.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What happens when energy is not seen as something that comes out of a plug in the wall, but something that can be struggled over, that governments make decisions over, that people find in their workplace, as well as something that affords something to the whole of the entire social structure?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

I think the first thing that happens is we actually understand the energy as a product of the material world, that is not simply a function on our spreadsheet, or something that we use, but something very related to complex, geological processes that take millions of years to form, as well as more contingent systems that people have devised. That exposes the precarity of energy systems — their finite nature in terms of fossil fuels — and also exposes our increasing reliance on huge chains of people and machines and actions and inactions that make our access to energy possible.

In some ways. I think that’s actually quite frightening. We experienced that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began; suddenly there were two things that happened, firstly an already-rising energy price situation became a lot worse, and people realised that their energy supply was actually being governed by the financial markets. There was a very real worry about the problems with energy supply in a physical sense — it didn’t come to fruition but it wasn’t necessarily far off in Britain and other parts of Europe as well. Historically, there have been lots of moments where the energy supply was a live question: the miners’ strikes, the 1970s blackouts, queuing for petrol because of international relations crises in the Middle East. There are various complicated explanations for that, but the point is that foreign oil producers made it difficult for Europe to get access to oil at its formerly cheap price, and that created difficulty in getting hold of petrol, which was an essential good for lots of people in western Europe and North America at that point of time.

The second point is that we started to realise that the way our society is structured, who has power, who has a say over essential bureaucracy, is contestable and political. That it can be radically changed, including over the organising of existing forms of production. Take the nationalisation of the British coal industry in 1947. That essentially took more or less Britain’s entire energy supply, if you think about how much Britain was a coal-fired economy at that point, into public hands. Transitions to new forms of energy involve power — it’s more than just fighting over existing forms of production. With nationalisation of coal, that led to drastic rationalisation which led to investing in large new collieries that privately-owned companies simply wouldn’t have had means or inclination to dig. But it also means that new energy forms look different. And it was in that context of nationalisation and national security concerns as military competition that the British state decided to embark on a military project that had a civil nuclear component to it. And it’s in the current context of the transition to green energy that we’ve had a discussion around the Green New Deal. I’d like to see the left be a bit more confident about differentiating left-wing versions of a transition and being ready to argue why they are better. To do that you need awareness of the material nature of energy, then the political nature of energy. That helpfully takes us away from assuming energy will always be plentiful, will always be available, will always be cheap. Those fallacies have been very much exposed in the last few years.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

I think that leads nicely into the question which is: there is a common intuition on the left that things about the past, historical social movements or historical knowledge is useful for the present moment. But exactly how that might be useful or put to use is very rarely cached out. I think what your work does is theorise those resources and how they become resources. Could you say a little bit about the notion of “usable pasts” in Coal Country, particularly how those resources might be useful for differentiating between left-wing and other versions of a transition?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

I think there are always two parts. The first part is more directly about the sort of stuff I do, what we’re doing right now, which is that I think we need our intellectual horizons to be broad enough to cover the way that recent and perhaps not so recent history has shaped our current circumstances. Scenarios have parallels which indicate the way that forms of conflict over the energy transition are going to be structured.

I do find it quite surprising that — across society — we are not paying more attention to the several energy transitions within living memory. I think it’s intellectually necessary for that political horizon to be aware of where the economic, social and political foundations of our current energy system lie and the changes that are already taking place that made that possible.

I think the second point is more about collective memory. I think it’s important that we take part in a struggle for collective memory over how the past is understood. I think that over the last few years, we’ve seen important incidents of that. For example, the successful campaign for miners’ justice in Scotland in terms of overturning convictions from the 1984/5 strike. Those convictions have been demonstrated now to be the result of highly politicised policing and court justice or injustice. We should consider that next to a wider discussion of energy transitions in that I think that was a very positive use of the past in the sense that the miners were actually fighting for economic security against the undemocratic imposition of colliery closures and in the interests of defending important public property and investment, and that this was a very unfair unjust way to enact energy transition and we're still wondering what the consequences are. I think that’s very useful.

What I’d say about these usable pasts is that you can't just make them up. People are shaped by stories, of course, by fiction, and I see that that is as effective as nonfiction. They're also shaped by cultural products — by TV, films, novels, history books and so on — but when it comes to history in political contexts like the one we’re talking about, we’re making use of some of the bits we can grasp for, and it has to be those bits which connect with some popular sense of what happened.

I’m a bit more easy-going about doing that than some somewhat traditional liberal-minded historians might be. We’re often studying how people remember the past and what they think happened and why they think it’s important as much as what actually happened. Of course, what actually happened is important, and as much as I spend time in archives researching important details that often aren’t part of the known public record of events, I also know I’ve gained a lot out of speaking to people who are appraising important changes in history, that lived through them and have interpreted them themselves.

And I suppose the other thing is that these histories have to be founded in some sort of accurate semblance of events. But they also probably work best when they’re embedded in institutions and described very broadly. It’s not enough to just tell a story. The way that they become a source for action in a stronger way is that they’re part of the self-knowledge of a movement or a group.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How has energy policy at a national level, especially in Scotland, affected the politics of work, including at moments of energy transitions?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

What’s interesting in Scotland is the creation of a British national energy economy in the 1940s — in the 1940s, coal is nationalised, the electricity supply is nationalised and then expanded massively. I think that creates the framework of a national energy economy. The fact that Britain is then importing large volumes of oil is a national experience as well. How does that affect the politics of work? Well, I think the rundown of employment in Scottish coalfields, especially in the 1960s at the behest of an increasingly centralised, nationalised British enterprise, politicises work on constitutional lines, because it creates a structure where decisions about miners’ welfare in Lanarkshire, for example, are decided in London.

So, it potentially creates a very direct clash of interests. And for that reason, the miners’ union comes out in support of a Scottish Parliament, within the UK admittedly, but still a Scottish Parliament, and did so very early, in the 1960s. It becomes a really important voice for devolution which then becomes a mainstream left view during the 60s and 70s.

Obviously, one of the other stimuli for that was the discovery of North Sea oil and gas. I think that was very, very important. I think we can’t really understand changes to the British economy, certainly we can’t understand Scottish politics and that understanding of the Scottish economy since 1970, without the story of oil and gas, what it means and who it should belong to being absolutely central.

The discovery  changes the regional economies of Scotland. Scottish economic and industrial activity in the nineteenth century was massively concentrated in and around Glasgow and Clydeside, that was the coal and steel economy and the shipbuilding economy. Essentially, the story of the second half of the twentieth century is economic activity moving north and east. There are tens of thousands of people working offshore now, for American or sometimes British multinational enterprises, working in workplaces that are often quite hostile to trade union organisation.

Others are also working in industries that are again at the centre of this debate around whether they should enjoy this oil wealth. That’s a debate that has several different cleavages: it’s partly about Scotland and Britain, and I think that’s how it’s been remembered, but it’s also about workers, labour and capital, and the insecurity that the offshore workforce experiences, the dangers that that workforce experiences, which is in some way a continuity with what has gone before in coal and oil sectors, but there’s a huge spike of danger associated with North Sea in the 70s and into the 80s.

It's also all about whether this wealth is public or private, and that’s often forgotten but seems especially important in our current transition. Especially in Scotland, the debate about renewables, where it’s been had, typically in conventional economic terms, has been about jobs and the lack of jobs. Even as we speak there are still less than three thousand offshore wind jobs. And a relatively small number of them are in manufacturing, which could be replacement jobs using the skills of offshore wind and gas workers. But oddly, the discussion about who the profits of wind generation should go to hasn’t been very prominent.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you give a brief history of those twentieth-century energy transitions?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

Britain is basically a coal economy across the first half of the twentieth century. There are cars and the military uses tanks and the navy uses petrol-powered ships, but most energy production, including in homes, at work, and transport are still coal-powered. There was a shift towards oil in the 1950s and 1960s. Essentially, coal retreats into electricity. Coal use in homes declines massively, roads replace rail and ships are increasingly powered by oil as well. Even in electricity, it was actually the building of lots of oil-powered power stations which was the really big challenge to the future of coal. These were government-instigated decisions, particularly when it comes to electricity. There was also the birth of nuclear. Nuclear ends up providing a significant share of Britain’s electricity by the end of the twentieth century but certainly never reached the hopes of the nuclear project, in again, a very much a state-instigated project. In the 1960s and into the 70s, you have the discovery of North Sea oil and gas. Over the 60s, North Sea discoveries are made, first gas, and then oil. Initially, this is gas off the southeast coast of England. Gas is actually really important; we tend to talk only of oil because oil is worth a lot of money in the 1970s and 1980s and it’s highly portable, so it becomes a major export, and it’s associated with Scottish constitutional politics. But, actually, one of the big energy transitions that happens in the 60s and 70s, a public-sector instigated transition, is the movement from coal to natural gas from the North Sea. Houses are powered by gas-fired boilers. This is either because they were built after the transition or the house was converted in the 60s or 70s. It was a very successful transition, and a relatively decarbonising one. In the 1980s and 1990s, you have privatisation and coal employment falls away to basically nothing. The nuclear project effectively ends. Then there’s the dash for gas. Recently, renewables have knocked gas off its perch — gas had become the main source of energy from the mid-90s to now, and that may have just changed.

What we’ve seen in the last decade or so is a huge expansion of wind. The Tories sabotaged that by effectively banning onshore wind farms in England and Wales, which in retrospect was an absolutely ludicrous decision, it was ludicrous at the time, and looks silly from our current context. So, Scotland has in many ways been in the lead of that process, partly because of that ban, partly because of the resources it has, partly because the Scottish administrations have promoted it.

Most important in renewables is offshore wind. Huge offshore wind farms are being developed around the British coast, and I expect that to continue. The discussion is then about who’s going to benefit from them, who’s going to own them, but I expect that we will see a future of massive expansion of them especially in the context of what will be an increasingly electrified society. That will be one route through renewable energies — electric cars or electric vehicles are probably archetypal examples of getting rid of a carbon-intensive fuel and replacing it. There are hopes around tidal energy, definitely in Scotland with possibilities around tidal power, and there are solar farms, but I think that’s the story of what has happened and is happening.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

As you’ve said, a green economy doesn’t automatically equate to good employment, and we can see this kind of insecurity in the renewable sector, but a just transition will depend on decarbonisation generating better forms of work. What kind of policies or politics do you think are needed either within a labour movement at Holyrood or in Westminster to win a better future?

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

The simple answer, if you begin with the fact that you have a resource at hand where you own land, even if you’re working with a private equity or a multinational, is that you’re negotiating over the use of your resources, and I think you have to recognise that. Preferably, that would involve a large public stake, or doing joint venture, especially if you’re the Scottish or Welsh governments where you won’t be in a position, frankly, to necessarily do the huge offshore wind farms yourself by any stretch. The UK government should own outright or very large portions of some of these. Importantly, the questions with all of this are who enjoys the revenues and profits, and what are the supply chain benefits going to be? Where are these turbines or solar power or tidal power going to be developed and where are they going to be built? What technology is going to be used? Do you want some sort of technology-sharing agreement? These are all things that should be in discussion. The Scottish government said they’d discuss these things and talked about all the jobs that were going to come. That was a couple of years ago and I don’t think there is a huge amount of evidence to suggest that they’re appearing.

You want these resources to be valued and run in the interests of the people. I don’t think that’s complicated or a particularly nationalist statement.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Down a level from the question of ownership to the question of democracy within a given workplace or sector, I wanted to ask about what you take workplace democracy to mean historically, particularly in relation to that entwined energy and labour history in Britain.

[.cdw-name]Ewan Gibbs[.cdw-name]

I think it is very important to start with your experience at the work level, what it’s like to be a worker, and the power that you feel you have or don’t have in the workplace is absolutely crucial. Workplace democracy means feeling that you live in a workplace that in some ways is regulated in your interests with you having a voice and say in how that workplace is organised and run. I think that almost always relates meaningfully to some form of trade union recognition.

The feeling that your particular work group or group of workers has recognition in the workplace is often quite important as well. I don't want to romanticise the past. You know, publicly-owned industries like electricity, in particular, I think was always very hierarchical. Partly that flows from the form of industrial process that we’re talking about, but it was also a place where people had recognised roles and understandings of rights and responsibilities. People had some sense that they existed in a structure where they had the right to some sort of speech, the right to some sort of say in that structure, but they possibly had responsibilities as well. I think that actually is something that’s quite common to electricity workers, and in some senses in the health service or elsewhere, that they know what they do is important, so they expect to be valued and they expect for that to be reciprocated by society at large. 

I also think there are questions above that level; things like collective bargaining on the one hand and on the other maybe a sense that you actually see how your industry is structured. In the 1970s, when Tony Benn was Secretary of State for Energy, he called these huge conferences that had representatives from all the energy consumer organisations, all the various unions, all the nationalised industries. They all got together and discussed the plans for the future. I’m not saying that these things were always massively successful, but I think it’s interesting as a way of organising society that involves discussions over really important subject matters in which people participate, not as citizens and voters, but as members of defined interest groups, which have an obvious logical connection to these economic affairs. I think there’s value in that thinking and in pursuing it further. Those sorts of structures have obviously completely eroded in Britain since those conferences took place in the 70s, but I think it’s probably important that when we’re thinking about something like energy that when we’re thinking about workers, thinking about what goes in energy, we’re also thinking of working-class interests, and that those societal interests and consumer interests are important here as well, because we all rely on energy. The labourist fallacy would be just to think about workers as workers; that’s important, but there’s a bigger story here when it comes to energy.