Ed Miliband at the UNFCCC COP29 Climate Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. (Image: Getty Images)
Has there ever been a more destructive British politician than whose vanity and fanaticism has left a trail of wreckage across his family, his party and now his country?
In his current role as Energy Secretary, his neurotic attachment to the net-zero agenda is driving up energy prices, increasing business costs and undermining our economic competitiveness.
Only this week, it was announced that the rate of inflation had shot up to 2.3%, mainly because of rising electricity and gas bills. Britain should not be in this position. We have huge reserves of oil, gas, and coal, yet ideological fervour means that we cannot exploit this advantage.
might be in the Cabinet, but his spirit is with the . In his twisted outlook, the deindustrialisation of our economy should be hailed as environmental progress, just as the neglect of our natural assets, combined with our dependence on unreliable renewables and expensive foreign imports, supposedly displays our moral leadership of the world.
His cultish environmentalism is just part of a wider pattern of dogma and misjudgement that has characterised his entire career. As the son of a renowned Marxist academic and the radical younger brother of the more moderate, centrist David, he was immersed in left-wing politics from an early age.
Tellingly, his first job was in the office of the socialist demagogue Tony Benn. Later was a devoted acolyte of Gordon Brown, whose abrasive, egocentric personality caused such instability in the last Labour Government.
But was just as capable of causing his own turmoil in Labour’s ranks. Having been elected an MP in 2005, he dissuaded his brother David from challenging Brown for the leadership in 2008 when the party was gripped by crisis.
“It would be like killing our father,” he told David melodramatically, adding that his brother’s hour would soon come. Yet when Brown resigned after the 2010 election defeat, Ed stood against David, narrowly winning thanks to trade union support. David was so shattered by his younger brother’s treachery that he moved across the Atlantic.
willingness to split his family brought no political reward. He proved a disastrous leader, not only losing the 2015 General Election, but also imposing a botched new membership system on the party which enabled the hard left to seize the leadership under firebrand . Yet after departure, brought him back on to the front-bench to push through his green programme. sees himself as the eco-saviour of Britain from the Climate Change apocalypse, but in truth he is a wrecker, with his bans on fossil fuels, his deluge of regulations and his growing array of levies and taxes.
The huge costs of creating a new energy infrastructure – including vast swathes of solar panels, wind turbines, pylons, cables, and storage facilities – are already bringing heavy burdens to households and businesses. According to the Office of Budget Responsibility, subsidies for renewables alone will amount to £12billion-a-year.
And what for? Britain accounts for less than one per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, so drive to impoverish our economy is a gigantic act of self-harm that will have no wider impact. Green campaigners talk grandly about Britain setting a moral example to the world, but that is just deluded, quasi-imperialist arrogance.
The chasm between suicidal virtue-signalling and other countries’ realism was highlighted last week at the farce of the Cop29 global summit in Azerbaijan. With blathering once more about global leadership, Britain sent no fewer than 470 delegates, more than other nations such as the US, France and Italy.
The rest of the world does not care about his rhetoric. He is like the leader of an irrelevant cult. America under is about to embrace a new era of cheap energy. Other western nations are moving in the same direction. Meanwhile, we are about to pay a savage price for vain posturing.
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Repealed by the horrors of the Holocaust, the post-war creators of the , led by the Tory statesman David Maxwell-Fyffe, a future Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor, saw it as a means of preventing genuine oppression.
But today, in a bitter inversion of these noble intentions, the ECHR has become a battering ram against the law, a demolition ball at the heart of civilization.
That reality has been highlighted by two appalling cases in recent days. In one, a convicted Indian paedophile, known only as “HS” who was jailed in 2021 for distributing child pornography, overturned a deportation bid because the court decided that such a move would harm his right to a family life.
In the other, a habitual drug dealer from Nigeria had his claim against deportation upheld because psychiatric care in his native land was deemed inadequate for the treatment of his mental health problems. This kind of judicial madness, dressed up as humanitarianism, has to stop. The sooner we leave the Convention, the better. No longer a bulwark of democracy, the Convention is now a catalyst of anarchy.
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Suella Braverman (Image: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Public outrage continues over the decision by the Essex Police to interrogate leading journalist and author Allison Pearson over an online message which another social media user claimed to find “offensive”.
This depressing saga has revealed a force where operational priorities are warped by fashionable ideology and where freedom of speech is treated with disdain. As the former Home Secretary put it yesterday, the case has nothing to do with “justice” but is “bureaucracy gone mad”.
Nor is Essex unique. In constabularies across the country, senior officers are acting like political commissars as they parade their woke credentials by piling up the number of non-crime hate incidents they report, of equality officials they employ, of diversity courses they organise.
And what is the Labour Government’s solution? Why more bureaucracy of course. This week, in response to mounting concerns about the police’s effectiveness, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced that she is going to establish a new “National Centre for Policing” and a new “Police Performance Unit”, which will oversee a new “Police Performance Framework” and a new “central database of force-level data.” That will really instil fear into the criminal classes.
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The next time you hear someone demanding “a public inquiry” into a major scandal or controversy, consider this: the cost of the official inquiry is projected to reach £208million by the time it reports in June 2026. Whatever their findings, the one certainty of these inquiries is that they will always be a bonanza for lawyers.
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Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn meets Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker in first trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Image: Warner Bros)
Actor Tim Dillon has described The Joker 2 – in which he makes a brief appearance – as “the worst film ever made”. That’s going a bit far, but this strange, plotless sequel is not a patch on the brilliant 2019 original. Yet that is true of so many sequels, which often seem exercises in cynical exploitation.
Perhaps the only truly great sequel is the Godfather II – part of the epic trilogy about an Italian-American Mafia family – which was released exactly 50 years ago next month and remains compelling viewing.
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As the tributes to the late Lord Prescott have emphasised, he was a formidable politician whose working-class authenticity was vital to Tony Blair’s government. Nor was his effectiveness as an operator undermined by his endearing habit of mangling his words. “The Green Belt is a great Labour achievement – and we intend to build on it,” he once said.