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We could have been as rich as Norway

If Britain had listened to Tony Benn, it could have been rolling in money, says neil clark

It's official. With oil selling at $70 a barrel, Norway is now the richest country in the world. Per capita incomes rose in 2005 to £35,800, passing both Switzerland and the US, and way ahead of Britain (£21,000).

Norway not only has no national debt, it has a $210bn surplus in its State Petroleum Fund (now known as the Government Pension Fund). It is a country that will never be poor.

Like Norway, Britain also faced the prospect of its economy being transformed by the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s. And we would now be in a similar position, if the plans of Tony Benn, Energy Minister when North Sea oil first came ashore in 1975, had been followed.

Benn inherited a situation under which licences to exploit North Sea oil had been given to oil companies without any provision for any of the oil to be directed to
The Norwegians have no national debt, a $210bn pension fund surplus and no prospect of ever being poor

meet UK needs. His response was to set up the British National Oil Corporation, a state-owned enterprise, to ensure that the country would derive maximum benefit from the development of new oilfields and to press for a North Sea oil development fund.

Benn wanted oil revenues to be ring-fenced for industrial regeneration and not used to finance short-term tax cuts. He also believed that an oil-rich Britain would be in a stronger economic position outside the EEC.

Sadly, Benn's far-sighted strategy was abandoned by the incoming Conservative administration of 1979. The BNOC was sold off, with Energy Minister Nigel Lawson proudly announcing that the Government's energy policy was that it didn't have one.

Norway had the wisdom to follow the much-derided Bennite path of state intervention and will reap the benefit for generations to come. Britain meanwhile relies on a service-based, debt-fuelled economy. If only we'd listened to Wedgie.

FIRST POSTED MAY 29, 2006

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