A team of local volunteers from the Leeds Greenpeace group have added posters to all the bus stops within a kilometre of Chancellor Rachel Reeves MP’s constituency office in Leeds West and Pudsey, calling on her to refuse permission to drill in new oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
Reeves’s constituency office is listed on her web page as being in the Bramley shopping centre, and the team used Google Earth to locate all of the bus stops with poster advertising within 1km of that site.
In a guerilla flyposting campaign on Tuesday evening, they replaced the commercial advertising with posters showing Reeves in front of an oil rig.
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The posters read:
“Rachel Reeves: Drills won’t lower bills
Tell Rachel Reeves MP: Opening new oil fields isn’t the answer to cheaper bills in Leeds West and Pudsey – renewable energy is”
The Labour Party made a manifesto pledge to decline any applications for permits to drill in new fields in the North Sea. However, there are two fields, Rosebank and Jackdaw, where permits were originally granted by the last government, and then overturned by the courts due to their Environmental Impact Assessments not including the hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon emissions expected from burning the fuel produced (‘Scope 3 emissions’).
The current government has not yet made a decision on whether to grant Shell and Equinor – the main companies involved – permits to drill in the two fields, and there has been speculation that the cabinet may be divided on the issue.
Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband has previously described the last government’s decision to give permission to the Rosebank field as a “colossal waste of taxpayer money and climate vandalism.” This chimes with the views of the UK public where, according to polling from YouGov, 54% of UK voters think that increasing renewables is the best way to ensure energy security, while only 25% think it is drilling for new oil and gas.
Angharad Hopkinson, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “Even the head of the International Energy Agency has made it clear that drilling new fields would do nothing to reduce UK bills or fix the problems caused by Trump’s war in Iran. Rosebank and Jackdaw are just two last ditch attempts for oil companies to profiteer at billpayers’ expense from the little left in the North Sea. What we need is home-grown, renewable energy that protects British billpayers from international conflicts, because the fuel is delivered to us free by the sun and the wind.”
