The European chemicals industry will be wiped out in a decade, with the loss of 6m jobs, unless politicians wake up to its chronic lack of competitiveness, the man at the centre of last year’s Grangemouth dispute has declared. Jim Ratcliffe, the majority owner of chemicals giant Ineos, has written to Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, warning that the chemicals industry is heading for the same fate as the textiles sector. He says a toxic cocktail of high energy costs – inflated by green taxes – feedstock prices in “another league” to those in America and the Middle East and uncompetitive labour are leading to the rapid closure of Europe’s chemical plants. --Alistair Osborne, The Daily Telegraph, 7 March 2014
