I’M NOT sure about luck. An island of coal, surrounded by fish, and flush with the ill-gotten gains of slavery, the British state stole a march — along with a great deal more — from the world to industrialise early and forge the rules of the great game still being played out to this day.

The discovery of North Sea oil and gas in the 1960s was heralded as being every bit as significant. The oil price “crisis” of the early seventies made it even more economical to extract, the privately owned oil majors piled in and Britain’s political class of all stripes appeared to understand the need for the state to at least have some sort of stake — if not for ideological reasons, for reasons of national security.

It should now be plain to see that the gold rush ended in the way every one before it did, with the rich richer, and the poorest left wandering the land scavenging for something to cash in at the scrappy. Great machines, monstrous rigs that made millionaires and billionaires towed in to join the queue for the gas axe.

The industry may still roar on, the profits may still roll in, and there may even be new fields approved for exploitation, but the truth is that the jobs are ebbing away as North Sea oil enters a living death.

The workers themselves know better than anyone that the industry’s time has come, but as the Unite union rightly points out, there should be no ban without a plan, no repeat of the outrageous abandonment of communities seen as the move was made from coal.

After all, it was the lack of a plan that got us into the mess in the first place. The involvement of the British state in the North Sea wasn’t insignificant, but for all the deals negotiated by Tony Benn, the stakes taken, the creation of the British National Oil Corporation, which set up an income stream, there was no firm idea of what to do with this thing.

Sovereign wealth funds were considered by Wilson and Callaghan-led Labour governments, but their dithering and an anxiousness to please the International Monetary Fund meant that there was no plan when the money started rolling into the Treasury, by which time they were rolling out.

Oil kept Thatcher afloat, in more ways than one. Scotland’s only oil-fired power station at Inverkip — built on the west coast when Arabian oil was cheap — was demolished a decade ago having only been fired up once in its 40-odd years of existence — during the miners’ strike of 1984-85.

This was merely a fallback position, of course. The North Sea supplied the “dash for gas” — driven more by accelerating coal’s decline as by any environmental concerns, whatever Mrs Thatcher’s supporters now like to claim.

The main event was not so much that it fuelled tax cuts for the wealthy — it did, but her rates of income tax on higher earners were still higher than today — but to fund the attempted destruction of the working class. Literally.

Her governments may have been able to sustain four million unemployed ideologically — they actively and openly supported unemployment as a brake on wages — but could not have hoped to survive it politically or economically without North Sea oil, or another piece of luck.

That other piece of luck came to mind over recent days as the Prime Minister’s flunkies talked of his approaching “Falklands moment.” The wave of wildly misguided patriotic fervour whipped up in 1982 is generally associated with the Tory landslide the following year. Ironically, navy cutbacks are thought to have contributed to the Argentine decision to invade the islands at that moment, not a problem Sir Keir is likely to encounter as he beavers away to “reshape” our economy onto a war footing.

The tragedy of this is manifold, but the government sources trailing plans for £6 billion in social security cuts to pick up the tab for bombs brought another faded memory back — Kenny Everett.

Another boon of free-flowing oil in the ’80s — for which our oceans are now paying a price — was the sudden proliferation of cheap plastic and foam novelties, and I can think of no greater example than the giant hands Mr Everett wore as he took to the stage of a pre-election Tory conference in 1983.

“Let’s bomb Russia!” he told the ecstatic hordes. “Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!” he cried, staring manically and scooping up the adulation with outsized prosthetics.

Could never happen today.

Not because Mr Everett’s hands couldn’t be recycled, nor because his general brand of humour has aged extraordinarily badly — it has — nor even because Mr Foot is no longer with us, more’s the pity.

No, why bother with such a stunt now, when we are already bombing Russia, and there are so many other sticks to kick away?

A year or so ago, at the refugee solidarity protests against the far right in Erskine, one incident still shocks me. My expectations of the far right are virtually zero anyway, but still, when one of their number stole a walking stick from an anti-fascist and used it to club him, it somehow still felt a particularly low act.

Mr Everett didn’t suggest beating Mr Foot with his stick, but the government he supported was already working hard to change the culture in social security from comfort to shame, and to transform “welfare” from a word of hope to an insult.

The beat goes on. In the meantime, the Labour Party’s leadership has transformed itself from something described as a “moral crusade” under Wilson, to one where 36 obsequious backbenchers can sign a letter lavishing praise on plans to slash welfare spending as a “moral duty.”

Depending on who you believe, the austerity already meted out to the people of this country has caused between 335,000 and 400,000 “excess deaths.”

With austerity now baselined in the system the body count continues to grow, but adding to it is, for some — including the granddaughter of Jimmy Reid, no less — required to further their careers.

Thankfully some in the Parliamentary Labour Party regard murder as a bad thing, and many of those bullied into holding on to the two-child cap a few months ago are beginning to realise they won’t get a second chance at this if they don’t make amends.

As one MP told me: “There are folk who are on board with this, folk that shite themselves and don’t want to rock the boat, and folk that want to climb the greasy pole.”

Here’s a message to each group in turn:

Folk that want to climb the greasy pole need to understand this will cost them their seats — starving the disabled into work isn’t the vote winner some believe it to be.

Folk that don’t want to rock the boat need to know that a big enough rebellion can’t be disciplined — it’s called “solidarity” and the bedrock of everything the working class have ever won including the right to sit in Parliament.

Folk fully on board with this may wish to consider talking to humans outside of Parliament or seek alternative employment as child catchers.

Any parliamentary rebellion ultimately must come from the electorate though, an electorate fed a diet of “poverty porn,” demonisation of their neighbours, and whose expectation of parliamentarians and the state is lower than it has been in generations.

There’s work to be done, but a line must surely now be drawn.

We cannot continue to accept the prop of the hard-hat tour around the guided missile factory in place of social supports that can transform lives.

Luck doesn’t deliver for the many, it never did.

That’s why the working class had to build social security in the first place, and why the future must be the big hand, not the big stick.