Power Up Britain, From Britain

As a member of Unite, I am delighted that the Government is falling into line with my trade union. It says a lot about both that the historic heartland of the SNP has been the North East, and it has always been the case that the SNP’s deal with the Greens was going to do it no end of harm there, in the Texas or Saudi Arabia of Europe, where it is always defending tiny majorities against the Conservatives, or seeking to overturn tiny majorities of theirs, or both. The SNP is at a weak point, and Rishi Sunak has gone in for the kill.

Yet the Conservatives are the party of Net Zero. They invented Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in general, and it was Boris Johnson who devised ULEZ in particular. The last time that they cut fuel duty, then the supermarkets put up their profits on it by five pence per litre, and the money kept flowing round like petrol. Road tax, meanwhile, ought to be abolished. While raising a tiny proportion of the enormous cost of maintaining the road network, it gives those who paid it the strange idea that they owned the roads. Get rid of it. By the time that what used to be the Clarkson Tendency had noticed, then, from their own point of view, it would be too late.

My favourite question of Greens is, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” It always stops them in their tracks. And I have the same question for post-Thatcherite culture warriors and opponents of Net Zero, “Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?” If not, then I can give you chapter and verse as to why you did not really regret the loss of any of things that you claim to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At the recent local elections in England, the considerable Green gains were mostly from the Conservatives.

Although she began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, Margaret Thatcher was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. Theresa May gave the nation the Climate Change Act, and her erstwhile Chief of Staff was last night selected for Matt Hancock’s seat. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the British coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for donkey’s years.

Leo Abse had the measure of the milk-snatcher, as he had of Tony Blair’s androgyny. With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.

Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. She created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour.

There is another way. We must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, so that everyone might enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet now we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. I am strongly in favour of solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs. 

Let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Say it again, harness the power of the State to bathe this country in heat and light from oil, gas, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, solar, and that without which there could also be no steel for rigs, pipelines, power stations or turbines, namely coal. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the defeat of the miners in 1985. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Reform UK lost its deposit at two of the recent byelections, while the Reclaim Party did so at the third. Unless you mean the Greens, who beat Reform and Reclaim on all three occasions, and who have 801 councillors to Reform’s 11 and Reclaim’s none, then there is no populist Right. There is only an unpopulist Right.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.