Barely a fortnight in power and Keir Starmer is already the master of all he surveys.
A massive, unassailable parliamentary majority. A weak, inexperienced Cabinet which will do what it’s told. A demoralised, decimated Tory party, its warring cliques too busy knocking lumps out of each other to provide an effective opposition.
A docile media in which the so-called ‘Tory press’ — the Daily Mail excepted, of course — is a shadow of its former self and the largely pro-Labour broadcasters are cheerleading from the sidelines.
Our new Labour Prime Minister is already strutting the world stage, confidently mingling with other world leaders at Nato and European summits, despite being a novice when it comes to geopolitics, while cosying up to key EU leaders as if Brexit had never happened.
Inflation back to the Bank of England 2 per cent target, the worst of the cost of living squeeze behind us, unemployment low, interest rates soon to fall, real wages rising strongly and economic growth gathering pace as consumer confidence returns.
Ed Miliband, former Labour leader (failed), now self-described ‘super-nerd’ on climate issues -zealot would be more accurate – but best understood as a one-man wrecking ball, writes Andrew Neil
A UK economy, in other words, which bears no resemblance to the basketcase Labour claims to have inherited from the Tories and whose continued recovery is threatened only if Labour makes cack-handed policy mistakes of its own.
So what could possibly go wrong? Step forward Ed Miliband, former Labour leader (failed), now self-described ‘super-nerd’ on climate issues — zealot would be more accurate — but best understood as a one-man wrecking ball.
At its worst, the energy and climate crusade on which he is embarking, driven by an obsessive green ideology, could at some stage bring the Government down.
More likely Miliband is merely setting out on a course which will undermine and derail much of what Labour claims as its core mission. One day, Starmer will wonder aloud why he ever gave Miliband the job.
At the heart of the Starmer/Reeves project are pledges to boost economic growth, increase business investment, create hundreds of thousands of new ‘green’ jobs and bring down household fuel bills.
As Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miliband will thwart all of that.
The policies he is pursuing will hinder growth, discourage investment, destroy jobs and increase fuel bills — while despoiling the countryside, just for good measure. It is one of the more curious features of modern democratic politics that failed politicians are able to reinvent themselves as Green crusaders.
It gives them a continued salience they would otherwise no longer have — and there’s money in it. The rich and powerful eco-industrial complex welcomes them.
Think Al Gore (failed presidential candidate) and John Kerry (failed presidential candidate). These two mediocre US politicians have been feted across continents as they travel the globe in their private jets warning about the apocalypse climate change will herald (even if it never quite materialises).
In Britain, older readers will vaguely remember John Selwyn Gummer, a pompous Tory lickspittle whose main claim to fame as agriculture minister under John Major was to feed his four-year-old daughter a hamburger in a media stunt during the Mad Cow Disease crisis.
He reinvented himself as Lord Deben, eco-crusader, who took Big Green’s shilling, and became chairman of the influential but hopelessly biased official Climate Change Committee. A more recent Tory Cabinet minister, Alok Sharma (also a peer), is following a similar trajectory.
Now we have Ed Miliband. A figure of much derision, even within the Labour Party, always remembered for his inability to eat a bacon sarnie, – and more recently for performing a cringemaking rendition of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind in front of a wind farm. Nor has he ever quite been forgiven for his disastrous 2015 general election campaign which gifted David Cameron’s Tories a surprise overall majority.
The policies Miliband is pursuing will hinder growth, discourage investment, destroy jobs and increase fuel bills – while despoiling the countryside, just for good measure
But unlike the failed ‘greenies’ before him — who largely burnished their eco credentials after government — he is a green fanatic back at its heart, which gives him the power to do more damage than they could ever aspire to. He’s already started.
Miliband is enthusiastically implementing Labour’s pledge to ban any new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. He might even have banned some licences that were already in the pipeline but whose approval process was not quite complete when Labour came to power. But that’s not clear, such is the confusion in his department.
No matter. Just refusing any new licences effectively kills off North Sea oil and gas anyway. Miliband claims his policy ‘will ensure the UK no longer remains at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets’. As is often the case in Mili-World, the opposite is true.
By running down the North Sea more quickly than natural depletion dictates, we won’t use any less oil or gas. We’ll just import more from the petrostate dictators Miliband affects to shun. They must be laughing all the way to their multi-billion sovereign wealth funds. It is stupidity squared (but perhaps par for the Miliband course).
True, North Sea production has been in decline since it peaked in 1999. It is marginal to global requirements, accounting for under 1 per cent of the world’s oil production. But it is still important to the economy, providing 50 per cent of our domestic oil and gas needs, supporting around 200,000 jobs, helping our balance of payments and attracting international investment for new fields.
Miliband is already managing to scare that off. The three oil companies meant to be developing the Buchan oil field, one of the biggest new fields, have delayed production until they get a better idea of what the Government has in store for them.
One oil executive said that the North Sea was now a worse investment environment than war-torn Libya. Thanks, Ed.
The Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, whose members operate in what is still (just) the oil capital of Europe, says 100,000 jobs are now at risk and £30billion in new investment. So are billions in tax revenues for the rest of this decade.
It is baffling that a Government short of cash and elected to boost growth and investment would be so cavalier on all three fronts when it comes to energy policy.
Sometimes you wonder if Starmer really has a clue what’s going on outside his metropolitan bubble.
Sir Keir Starmer and Miliband visit an offshore wind turbine in Wales in March
It goes from baffling to bizarre when it’s realised that none of this will make a blind bit of difference to hitting any Net Zero targets for CO2 emissions. More than 75 per cent of our energy needs come from oil and gas. It will remain over 50 per cent for many years to come.
Even the Climate Change Committee admits fossil fuels will still supply 25 per cent of our energy by 2050, when we’re legally meant to hit Net Zero. We’ll still be using the stuff, just importing it, which will generate more emissions than domestic production.
But, whatever the cost or the absurdity, reality never gets in the way of Miliband’s eco-obsessions, another of which is to ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by 2030.
This requires a massive expansion of renewable capacity, the development of huge battery storage as a back up for when the wind isn’t blowing and/or the sun isn’t shining (which, surprisingly, it sometimes doesn’t in Britain) and the creation of carbon capture and storage to bury the emissions from any fossil fuels we’ll still use to generate electricity.
The technology to build the scale of battery storage required does not yet exist. Nor does carbon capture on a large scale. If and when they do exist, you can be sure the costs will be astronomical.
Miliband is pinning future electricity generation on technologies that have yet to be developed on an economic scale. It is a recipe for rolling ‘brownouts’ (low levels of electricity supply) and even frequent blackouts.
Undaunted, Miliband plans to double onshore wind capacity, treble solar and quadruple offshore wind. He plans to build at least twice as much renewable capacity in five years as we’ve managed in the past 15.
The scramble to proceed at such a pace means the cost of everything from materials to skilled labour will soar. It will also desecrate the countryside.
Huge swathes of land will be given over to solar panels. Miliband has overruled the Government’s own planning inspectorate and ignored local opinion to approve a massive solar park covering thousands of acres on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.
Many more such developments will be rolled out. Not only do they lay waste to the countryside, they undermine our food security. We already import too much food. By covering good farmland in solar panels, we will soon be importing more. Food prices will be even more vulnerable to volatile world markets.
Farming jobs will be at risk or lost. House values will be blighted by nearby development. There will be precious few new jobs to compensate — nearly all the solar panels will come from China and only one in ten turbines will be built in Britain (if we’re lucky).
But wealthy landowners will make a mint. Welcome to socialism, 21st century style.
It won’t stop there. Soon our hillsides will be littered with more wind turbines now Miliband has lifted the moratorium on onshore development. All in pursuit of that 2030 target for decarbonising the grid which nobody outside Miliband’s green zealots think can be met.
Miliband’s path to Net Zero is the road to nowhere. In pursuit of an ideological obsession which most of the country does not share and from which the rest of the world is turning away he will impoverish the country, writes Andrew
Even Labour-supporting unions believe it to be a dangerous conceit, likely to destroy more jobs than it will ever create. Think more offshore wind won’t affect you? Think again. The landfall for cables from offshore wind tend to be well away from the big population centres that need the power. So multi-billion pound overhead power lines will need to be built, further ravaging the countryside.
There’s already a huge row over a proposed new line of pylons from East Anglia to the Thames Estuary. Such controversies are about to become commonplace. When it comes to our ‘green and pleasant land’ Miliband and his Merry Green Band have curiously mislaid the ‘green’ bit. A strange loss for supposed environmentalists.
The cost of all this — extra renewable capacity, investment in untried technology, a massive expansion and upgrade of the National Grid — will be in the hundreds of billions, as a Labour politician recently, if unwittingly, admitted.
You will soon be paying for it.
It is one of the Big Lies of the Green Blob that renewable power is cheaper and will cut our fuel bills. Don’t believe it. Half of Denmark’s electricity is generated by wind and is the most costly in Europe.
If it were true that renewables were cheaper, wind power companies would not be demanding ever bigger subsidies – in the form of long-term price guarantees linked forever to inflation – to build more renewable capacity. But they are.
They know that most estimates of renewable power costs are fantasy which don’t include connection or storage costs or the cost of keeping gas-fired stations on standby for low or no-wind days. Plus, those few days when the sun isn’t shining.
But don’t worry. Great British Energy, Labour’s state-owned miracle worker is aiming at cheap renewables for all. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
There is no shortage of private capital ready to build renewables. They just want big enough handouts, which we end up paying for, to make their investments profitable. GB Energy is designed to help them do that — a prime example of corporate welfare writ large.
With a budget of only £8.3billion over five years it certainly won’t be able to do much on its own without Big Green. One wind power giant was recently preparing to spend £10billion on new capacity off our shores.
But that huge sum paid for only three new wind farms. It’s since had second thoughts. Alongside the scale of what’s required to decarbonise the grid in five years, GB Energy is at best marginal, at worst irrelevant.
The price of Miliband’s folly, if it proceeds pell-mell, will be felt in every domestic fuel bill before the decade is out. But the damage will be wider and worse than that.
Growth undermined. Jobs destroyed. Investment curtailed. Living standards hit. What’s left of our heavy industry, already dealt a body blow by previous green policies, shuttered or fleeing abroad.
Miliband’s path to Net Zero is the road to nowhere. In pursuit of an ideological obsession which most of the country does not share and from which the rest of the world is turning away he will impoverish the country.
It is all the more unfathomable because it will make no difference to global emissions, for which we already account for under 1 per cent. A sensible climate policy would simply pledge that our emissions would always remain below 1 per cent — and wait for the big emitters (India, China, America) to do their bit too. But sense is the last thing to expect with Miliband in charge.
Unless Starmer wakes up quickly to the carnage in prospect, the wrecking ball will continue its grim progress.
I’ve always thought the first big Labour Cabinet row would be between Miliband and Starmer, backed by a Treasury at the end of its tether as its economic strategy struggled to cope with Net Zero. But the damage is already underway and, unless that confrontation comes soon, Starmer will discover it’s too late to reverse it.
