Ed Miliband hasn’t got a nuclear energy plan either. (Image: Getty)
We knew in 2015 that putting Miliband and power together was a bad idea.
A cracking line from Robert Jenrick’s leadership speech at the Conservative Party Conference this week. How wise the public were at the 2015 General Election to reject Ed Miliband, and yet here we are in 2024 and Starmer has made this man the Minister for Power. A man so obsessed with net zero, he is prepared to risk blackouts and bankrupting the country to pursue his ideological student politics.
If Miliband wants to preach net zero, travel the length and breadth of the country converting people to his cause, that’s entirely up to him– but a Minister of the Crown, whose choices impact the lives and livelihoods of us all and for generations to come, needs to hold a less ideological position. Ministers should have their feet on the ground, with their decisions rooted in reality.
Indeed, just this week net zero mad Miliband – in his dash to decarbonise – closed the last remaining coal-fired power station in the UK just as China and India open one up weekly, making us more dependent on foreign energy.
Miliband too is overseeing the destruction of our oil and gas industry. Closing down our oil fields when our economy remains highly dependent on fossil fuels and will be even after we reach net zero – 25 per cent of our energy will still come from fossil fuels – is nonsense on stilts.
The incoherence of Labour’s energy policy – closing down our oil and gas production while importing more from abroad – is breathtaking in its stupidity. Last year alone the UK spent almost £27bn on importing crude oil and more than £21bn on gas imports from countries who have no regard for net zero. This only serves to hike energy prices (the UK already pays the most for electricity in the OECD)and in doing so destroys our manufacturing base.Our last blast furnace in Port Talbot closed this week and guess what it, will be opening up in India instead, and Ed Miliband thinks this is a triumph!
Worse still, Miliband hasn’t got a nuclear energy plan either. The UKis going backwards as Miliband sucks up to major Labour Party donor, and former funder of Just Stop Oil, Dale Vince. And as Labour turns its back on nuclear, President Macron is wooing our advanced nuclear energy start-up businesses with Newcleo – an Anglo-Italian company developing a type of mini reactor that can be fuelled with reprocessed nuclear waste – announcing its relocation from London to Paris on Monday. Instead Mad Ed would sooner see 2,792 acres of food producing fields have solar panels on them!
We will all pay a huge price for Labour’s incoherent and absurd energy policies, which would see us buy more from abroad, and from countries who care not a jot about carbon emissions, while all the time pretending we are reducing ours.
Labour’s energy policy will leave us bankrupt and beholden to other countries. It is frightening.