Ed Miliband’s green transition plan could blow away the growth Rachel Reeves needs to deliver (Image: Getty)
As Rachel Reeves repeatedly tells us, her number one priority is generating economic growth. Unfortunately, she instantly shot that plan down with her disastrous Budget.
Her £25billion hike to employer’s national insurance contributions will revive inflation, drive up company costs, squeeze wages and hit hiring. The economy is likely to shrink as a result.
Reeves saved a few bullets for , Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. She did that by making it more expensive for house builders to hire the staff they need to .
Energy secretary Ed Miliband wasn’t going to miss out on the fun. As he showed when leading Labour’s doomed 2015 election campaign, he’s a past master in the art of own foot shooting.
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Miliband dreams of making Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030, to wean us off fossil fuels and trigger a boom in homegrown clean energy.
We all have our dreams but they have to hit reality at some point. Miliband’s claim that he will make the “UK energy independent, bring down energy bills for good, create good jobs, and tackle the climate crisis” don’t stand up to scrutiny.
First, he’s destroying jobs. . He’s wreaking further havoc in the UK’s North Sea oil and gas industry.
Even if the green transition is a success, the UK will still need oil and gas for years to come, so we should source as much as possible ourselves. Instead, we’ll be even more dependent on imports.
His dream of and he won’t do much for climate change either. By importing more fossil fuels we’ll simply shift our emissions to other countries.
As for bringing down energy bills, forget it. They’re more likely to rocket, and blow yet another big hole in Reeves’ already bullet-riddled growth plan.
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The UK already has the highest electricity prices in the world. We paid 25.56p per kilowatt hour in 2023, compared to Germany’s 15.64p.
Energy intensive industries have been abandoning the UK because they can’t compete.
They’ll find it even harder if president-elect ramps up shale oil fracking and drives US energy costs even lower.
It’s a little-known fact that the UK is the first major economy to halve its greenhouse gas emissions, having cut them by 50% between 1990 and 2022.
Part of that is due to the shift from coal. Another reason is that we don’t make much stuff anymore. Our manufacturing base has been outsourced to China and India, along with our emissions.
By driving energy costs even higher, Miliband will only speed up the process.
His net zero charge will cost the UK £3trillion, according to National Grid ESO. Electricity bills must rise at least 40% to pay for that, squeezing business margins further and making consumers even poorer.
And where is Reeves going to find the money from? She won’t. It’s not there and she can’t borrow it. If Miliband goes on like this, he’ll blast her growth plan to pieces, and the UK economy. I don’t think we can survive five full years of this Labour madness.