Industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe has told Chancellor Rachel Reeves that the government must scrap an “idiotic” carbon tax which is preventing firms investment and only adding to CO2 emissions.
Sir Jim is owner of petrochemicals firm Ineos which has just received a £50m grant from the UK government to keep its Grangemouth ethylene plant open.
He said green taxation “squeezes the life out of home production” and encourages carbon-causing imports.
Following yesterday’s visit to the plant by the Chancellor and Business Secretary Peter Kyle, the billionaire businessman issued a statement saying that simply applying corporation tax to North Sea production would see investment rise.
He was responding after Ms Reeves was ridiculed for denying academic research pointing to 1,000 jobs a month being lost in the oil and gas sector.
Grangemouth oil refinery closed earlier this year and the ExxonMobil ethylene plant at Mossmorran will shut in February. Its chairman Paul Greenwood yesterday blamed market forces and government policies for its demise.
The UK government yesterday announced a £75m loan guarantee and £50m grant alongside £25m of equity from Ineos to keep the Grangemouth ethylene plant open.
Sir Jim said the UK government’s intervention at Grangemouth is “a timely and welcome recognition of the need to maintain our core manufacturing capability in the UK and I want to thank them for their support for this vital UK infrastructure.
“Grangemouth is hugely important both economically and strategically. We need jobs. We need home production. We need national security which we lose if we can’t run hospitals or make armaments or transport food.”
However, he said government policy was undermining attempts to build the economy.
“The government’s support for Grangemouth is a great start but is only a start in re-establishing a competitive manufacturing base for the country,” he said.
“We now MUST scrap carbon taxation, the most idiotic tax in the world. It simply squeezes the life out of home production as there is no cash left for investment and we end up replacing home produced goods with imported products from places that still burn coal!
“An utterly ridiculous tax that kills industry and increases global CO2 emissions.
“Furthermore, we need an energy strategy that provides competitive energy costs to industry and we must maximise our output from the North Sea which still has abundant reserves.
“If the government simply applied corporation tax rates to North Sea production, investment would rise and output would grow.”
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