In his attempt to bankrupt Britain before he’s kicked out (he’s made a great start by bribing the unions and killing business) Sir Keir Starmer is currently receiving good advice towards this end from other net zero nuts at Cop29, renamed Flop29 because no other heavies have bothered to turn up.
China and India are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases by far, but Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi couldn’t make the trip because they were busy having a shave that day.
The fact that any country is there is because they all have their hands out (including the Taliban) hoping Starmer and his loyal chum Miliband, will agree to their $1trillion demand to pay for the damage caused, they say, by the West’s consumption of oil which they claim causes climate change.
And if we don’t agree they will continue to send their people across the Channel and will shake us down for the money in that away. Starmer has closed the door on reparations but has gone quiet on paying Africa for sunshine.
Quite why Starmer thought it worth his while to fly to Azerbaijan (geographical note, it’s between Russia and Iran) is beyond me and why any of the delegates would take any notice of his thoughts is equally baffling.
Thanks to our net zero drive and the money we are pouring in through wind farms, solar and the like, our electricity prices are currently the highest in the world by miles; literally four times that of the United States. How can we compete?
And it’s going to get worse. Give credit to Rishi Sunak (and you don’t see that said very often) he did the nation a favour rowing back the fossil fuel vehicle phase-out to 2035.
That was reversed by Starmer who brought back the 2030 deadline for EVs being the only form of car you will be able to buy. The Times, in an editorial, described this as a ludicrously hubristic and unenforced error.
There will be others under Starmer. He is at least as nutty on this issue as Ed Miliband. As a young lawyer, he found common cause with environmental radicals. He may have just been looking for clients with deepish pockets but in 2020 when asked if he was still red-green replied: ‘’Yeah’’.
That’s about the only policy belief that I’ve ever heard from him. And it will be you who picks up the bill.
All the think tanks say getting rid of carbon at this speed will be hugely expensive with Neso, the government’s own energy supply watchdog, warning domestic power may have to be rationed with the 2030 target. We simply can’t guarantee when the wind blows or the sun shines.
Even’s Labour supportive lapdog, the GMB union, warns that the 2030 line is out of the question.
Starmer says that the plan is not about telling what people to do with their lives. Really? Since gas boilers will be banned, even with government subsidies (that’s your money by the way) the costs of putting in heat pumps will still be another £5,000-£10,000.
Those numbers will be enough to get Starmer kicked out in 2029. So perhaps we don’t have to bother about his mad plans except that he has five years to wreak havoc on us.
And if the last four months is anything to go by, he’s good at that.