On Track

In June 2018, The Northern Echo and a number of other regional newspapers in what went on the become the Red Wall areas advanced a rail policy that all MPs for those areas ought now to include among their conditions for supporting any Government. I gave that commitment as a candidate at the last General Election, and I repeat it as a candidate for the next General Election.

We need an all-of-the-above energy policy based around nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal; Britain was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike, and it ought to be so again. We also have increasingly evident reserves of lithium, and we have our own oil and gas reserves, not least the Cambo oil field west of the Shetland Islands.

Around these, by all means let there be solar power, wind power, tidal power, and anything else that we could possibly use to bathe our country in heat and light while keeping us away from any entanglement involving, for example, Saudi oil or Russian gas. Wind and tidal turbines are of course made of steel, the manufacture of which requires coal such as we have in abundance and ought therefore to be mining on a huge scale, beginning, as already proposed, in Cumbria.

Among other things, the all-of-the-above energy policy would make possible an all-of-the-above transport policy with public transport free at the point of use, plus electricity free at the point of use up to really quite a high level of usage, with only a nominal charge thereafter. This is why we have a State, and neither any party nor any candidate that had not made and, given the opportunity, honoured these commitments would be worthy of anyone’s vote.