This government’s North Sea policy is a reminder that, for all his affectations to northern grit and plain-speaking, Andy Burnham is a prisoner of elite opinion.

The Prime Minister wants to be liked by those who hand out the head-pats – the London liberal Press, the global NGOs, and the public intellectuals – because these are the people his ministerial colleagues and backbench MPs look to for moral leadership.

The Labour Party’s status anxiety would be a private misfortune were it not for its effect on public policy, and nowhere has it done more damage than on the oil and gas industry.

The Daily Mail’s revelation yesterday that officials expect 100,000 North Sea jobs to be lost by 2050 will have been received in Aberdeen and its surrounding areas with grim resignation. 

There is still anger there. Tory Douglas Lumsden’s thumping victory in June’s Aberdeen South by-election was a cry of pure frustration by voters – but many have given up hope of saving their local economy.

Net Zero has done a number on Scotland’s oil and gas sector and the North East economy. More than 18,000 jobs – one in every ten – have been lost in the past 15 years, while house prices in the Granite City have cratered by £7,500 on average. Nowhere in Scotland have property values fallen so precipitously.

One hundred thousand is an ominous figure for Treasury economists, but for Aberdonians it feels like an inevitability. 

Is it any wonder, when they hear the new prime minister intends to continue the old prime minister’s disdainful distance from a fossil fuel industry which has brought prosperity to their communities and ready supplies of energy to Britain as a whole?

For years, the sector has been urging ministers to approve exploration licences for the Rosebank oil field north-west of the Shetlands, and the Jackdaw gas field off the coast of Aberdeen. (Public consultations for both sites ended this month but Burnham has remained silent about the Government’s decision, and is said to be concerned about the ‘optics’ of approving new drilling during a summer of heatwaves and wildfires.)

Unions representing energy workers have added their voices. Unite, which is running a No Ban Without a Plan campaign, warned in March that the Government’s stance on fossil fuels was ‘putting jobs and national security at risk’.

The GMB, which wants a ‘stronger and fairer’ transition to green energy, penned an open letter to Labour MPs in July, proposing ‘an all-energy approach’ that ‘builds on our industrial strengths rather than overlooks them’.

Britain faces a cost-of-living crisis driven partly by spikes in the price of fuel and products derived from crude. Conflict in the Middle East is creating uncertainty over access to fossil fuel sources upon which our energy security now relies.

There is a ready-made solution that would lower prices, and that is to license drilling for domestic purposes only. Under these conditions, producers would have no option to sell their oil and gas outside the UK, meaning prices would be set by domestic rather than international markets. High demand would be met by increases in supply and limited marketability.

This should not be a difficult call, least of all for a Labour prime minister. Yet leaked documents suggest Burnham intends to maintain the cowardly approach of Keir Starmer and kowtow to fashionable opinion. 

Burnham is reportedly considering a ‘huge investment’ in new infrastructure to ramp up the importation of oil and gas, spending vast sums in taxpayers’ money to buy in supplies from other countries and thus sustain the thousands of job losses in the domestic industry.

Ministers are even looking at the possibility of acquiring a giant ship capable of cooling gas, making it smaller in volume and easier to transport by tanker from countries such as the US, Qatar or Norway.

Imagine telling the trade unionist founders of the party that the day would come when a Labour prime minister would fund jobs for foreign workers while causing layoffs for their British counterparts.

Britain’s energy policy should not be captive to the whims of privileged elites in careers insulated from the sort of instability inflicted on the oil and gas industry; people who live very far away from the communities whose living standards they are happy to wreck in exchange for feeling good about themselves.

The likely climatic impact of production at Rosebank and Jackdaw would require a microscope to be detectable. In the grand scheme of atmospheric emissions, the CO2 fallout from Rosebank and Jackdaw would pale compared to the drilling being done by fossil fuel powerhouses such as China and India.

Opposition to development of these fields is political purism of the worst kind, for it not only inflicts needless pain on a sector which has suffered already, it does so in the name of ecological virtue. A bogus virtue at that, for importing oil and gas despoils the planet more than simply removing it from our own seabed.

There are reports that Burnham might split the difference by approving production at one field but not the other, thus throwing a bone to the industry while handing the Net Zero fanatics a partial victory. How Blairish of our plainspoken, tell-it-like-it-is Prime Minister.

This approach would represent the worst of all worlds, being too modest to return prices to affordable levels and thus handing the anti-prosperity lobby an opportunity to claim that domestic energy production is a fool’s errand.

The priority should not be adding to infrastructure to import more oil and gas, but using existing infrastructure to produce more of it ourselves.

What the North Sea lacks is a prime minister with the gumption to face down those bent on impoverishing Britain to scratch an ideological itch. To tell them their days of choking our economy are over and that there is now a government that backs British workers and industry.

Andy Burnham is not that prime minister and never will be. The King of the North wants to be accepted by the court of the metropolitan elite, and echoing their luxury beliefs is the price of admission.

The North Sea industry will continue to die, affluence and opportunities will keep draining from Aberdeen, and British households will see their bills climb higher. Britain will be in hock to nations of varying levels of friendliness, paying billions for the privilege of keeping the lights on.

Meanwhile, despite the spin and the subsidies, green energy will still fail to meet our needs and the Government will tell us we must rein in expectations and lower our standard of living even further. The high priests of the Net Zero cult will go on immiserating Britain because they believe we deserve it as punishment for our ecological sins.

Rather than lead the nation to prosperity, Andy Burnham will bend the knee to this job-killing, wealth-squelching dogmatism.

A few months ago, there was a ripple of anxiety over the impending coup against Keir Starmer. Labour insiders feared it could all go horribly wrong and Britain could end up with Ed Miliband as PM. Sometimes it feels like we did.