Capture and Storage

Although it seems a bit odd from the Government of Grangemouth, Port Talbot and Ratcliffe-on-Soar infamy, there is in principle nothing wrong with carbon capture and storage, and the areas in question could certainly do with the jobs. The point is that, for technology that does not yet exist beyond the drawing board, £22 billion, the same sum of money as the "black hole" that supposedly necessities the starving of children and the freezing of the elderly, is to be given to, well, whom, exactly? There are shades of the PPE fraud here.

When Jeremy Corbyn proposed spending £37 billion on planting trees, which are by far the most efficient form of carbon capture and storage, then he was screamed down as a barmy old hippy. The cross-party and all-media derision was comparable to when he dared to mention buses, which caused Louise Haigh to say that she regretted having nominated him for Leader. Where is she now? If the then regime on Durham County Council was anything to go by, then the Labour Right has a psychotic hatred of buses. Once Corbyn expressed his support for them, then buses were anti-Semitic, and so were trees. Yes, really. The times were, as Jonathan Ashworth might put it, "sort of wacky".

Haigh's half-hearted bus policy, like the non-renationalisation of the railways' rolling stock and like the fact that several of the franchises will not come up for renewal until well into the next Parliament, is a sign of a Government that has been, very willingly, captured and stored. Another will be the abandonment of the right to switch off. The Government that is retaining the two-child benefit cap, and which is withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from almost all pensioners, is also preparing to increase the power over claims for sickness and disability benefits of DWP staff without medical training, to require them to fail a minimum number of applicants regardless of any other consideration, to revive the age-old Blairite dream of replacing those benefits with vouchers, to put "job advisers" in hospitals, to privatise as much of the NHS in England as it could get away with before even the BBC admitted to having noticed, and to legalise assisted suicide. That last measure should be seen in the context of the others, and vice versa. We have all been captured. We must refuse to be stored.