http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... a-tax-cuts

Yeah, maybe after the election.

'we can't make tons of money ripping you people off any more so we're asking the government to give us some of your money instead'.

when the price on the open market of the product you produce drops, your profits drop. That's just basic maths. You don't get ask someone else to just give you money to keep your profits up.

Privatised profits, nationalised losses. Every. Single. Time.

Not really this time. Its expensive to get oil out of the North Sea - when the cost of oil falls below a certain level (and that will be on a site by site basis) then its no longer worth getting it out. A good percentage of the cost is tax. If you want them to keep employing lots of people and them paying tax then it might be better to reduce the tax on the extraction of oil and keep them employed. Once the porce of oil goes up you can up the tax again

Didn't seem to hold for miners or steel workers. Why should it hold for oil workers?

Those weren't otherwise productive industries taxed beyond their capacity to pay, they were subsidised. The oil industry pays lots of tax and when prices are high the government is happy to hit them with windfall taxes on top.

Also the Oil industry isn't dominated by a militant union, whose leaders are publicly-avowed communists, playing escalatio with the government

Actually the North Sea is pretty much the most expensive place in the world to drill for oil/gas. It needs a much higher oil price to sustain it than other areas.

Indeed. The Offshore Industry Liaison Committee. (Though I believe it's now been merged into some other union) was very prograssive and proactive. Unlike other unions, it's motto didn't seem to be 'We strike therefor we are'.

That's globalisation. Sucks for you and I do genuinely sympathise with you but you're far from the first to have your industry hammered because what it does can be done cheaper elsewhere. And, frankly, you won't be the last either. There could be the principle that we all contribute to maintain our production/manufacturing capacity - and indeed other countries do - but I'm afraid the precedent is very much set that we don't do that. Definitely not a Tory principle, unless you're in the finance sector anyway.

It'll pick back up eventually.

They are only asking to stop paying higher taxes than everyone else. That isn't a handout.

To be honest, tax cuts wouldn't come close to making up for the drop in oil price as far as income from oil goes. The industry will just have to ride it out and start spending again in a few years when the price goes back up.
The downside of that is that every time there's a downturn, the industry lays people off quite quickly and many never come back. The north sea has only just recovered skills wise from the last down turn. This has lead to higher costs as higher wages can be demanded.