Andy Burnham's framing as prime minister — "the question isn't whether Britain will still be using oil and gas, the question is, where does it come from?" — is the most honest articulation of UK energy policy in years. Oil and gas still provided 75% of the UK's energy in 2025. About 43% of overall energy was imported. Fewer than 2% of households have heat pumps. Nearly 95% of vehicles on the road run on petrol and diesel. These are not numbers that bend to rhetoric. The Jackdaw gasfield, 150 miles east of Aberdeen, has finally been approved to produce in time for winter. At peak it will contribute roughly 6% of UK North Sea gas production across an 11-year lifespan. It won't move consumer prices. It was never supposed to. The argument was always about tax receipts, jobs, balance of payments, relative emissions, and the security of piping domestic gas straight into the national grid rather than importing chilled LNG from Texas shale fields — with all the carbon overhead of cooling fuel to -160°C, shipping it, and regasifying it at the other end. The security dimension has hardened. The strait of Hormuz can close overnight. The US president can threaten to ban diesel exports. Russian ships prowl the North Sea. Norway scrapped a planned electricity cable to Scotland in 2023. The 725-mile Langeled pipeline carrying 40% of UK gas consumption from Norway is a single point of failure. "Just in time" has given way to "just in case," and Jackdaw is a small bet on the right side of that shift. The government's previous approach was incoherent: championing "clean homegrown energy" from wind, solar, and nuclear while simultaneously maximising fossil fuel imports and offshoring the emissions that came with them. Gary Smith of the GMB union spotted the flaw clearly: the UK couldn't claim climate leadership while simply moving emissions columns around a spreadsheet. Jackdaw is a step toward intellectual honesty, not a step away from net zero. Rosebank, near the Shetlands, is the harder political proposition — mostly oil, more polluting, longer production timeline. But the structural argument overlaps: jobs, investment, taxes, and the ability to impose higher environmental standards during production. The "it's all exported" objection misses the European refining network — much of Rosebank's output would return to the UK as petrol, diesel, and jet fuel after processing in Rotterdam. The UK has only four refineries left, down from nine at the turn of the century. The real metric is the ratio of domestic production to consumption. On the current trajectory, only about a third of UK fossil fuel consumption comes from domestic sources on a net basis. Even with a North Sea boost, lobbies reckon the ratio reaches roughly half. Nobody is talking about the UK becoming a net exporter again. The new "energy wealth fund" that will reinvest oil and gas revenues into renewables and low-carbon projects has the right financial logic — recycle the old system's receipts to accelerate the transition — but we wait to see what it means in practice. Jackdaw is not a paradigm shift. It is a correction to a policy that was simultaneously pro-renewables and pro-import-dependence, a stance that made no strategic or environmental sense. The real transition test remains the pace at which the UK stops using fossil fuels, not whether it admits to using them.
