Knowing The Drill

The Durham Miners’ Gala will be held this Saturday. When he was Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband told it something very different from what he has been saying today. As a member of Unite, I am sorry to see the party to which it is inexplicably still affiliated attack the oil and gas industries in terms worthy of the Conservatives, who have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years.

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 claimed to, although you might sincerely believe that you did. At local elections in England, Green gains, often considerable, are largely from the Conservatives, from whom they have just picked up two parliamentary seats, twice as many as from Labour.

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 has just taken over Matt Hancock’s seat. Boris 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.

Instead of this, 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. Do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Likewise, at the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies paid out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt. Servicing its debts costs 28p in every pound that its customers paid.

So we are all expected to bail out the water companies, at whatever rate were demanded by their shareholders, which are largely foreign states as such, and which we permit to charge whatever they pleased. Like all of those regulators, staffed as they are by past and future employees of those whom they were supposed to be regulating, Ofwat should be replaced with a Secretary of State accountable to Parliament, and the rules against that revolving door should also be tightened both on paper and in practice. Better yet, those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that? More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments.

See also the half a billion pounds in public subsidy to Tata Steel, for it to cut 2800 jobs at Port Talbot and turn the place into a glorified recycling centre. Being strategically vital, steel should be in public ownership, and nothing should receive a public subsidy without at least some public shareholding and board level representation, for the exercise of which the First Lord of the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the relevant Secretary of State should be accountable to the House of Commons. Any eventual dividend should be divided equally among the holders of all National Insurance numbers. But if something would go bust without public money, then obviously it should be in public ownership outright.

For example, the railways. Again, several of those publicly dependent companies are in fact foreign states. They often overcharge here in order to keep fares low at home. That is the context in which what is now the foreign-owned Royal Mail is to stop using the freight trains that it had run since 1830. The Royal Mail, that is, from which the Post Office was hived off because, as long ago as 2011, the whole City knew about Horizon and would have refused to have bought the Royal Mail in its complete form, or to have handled the sale. The EU banned the renationalisation of the rail service, and it required the privatisation of the postal service. But we have left the EU. Take Back Control.