Created In The Fire

I do not know how Henry Tufnell made into the Mandelson intake, but I can see how he got nothing in the Mandelson reshuffle. He is far more right that wrong here:

Britain needs greater energy sovereignty. Wars in Iran, Ukraine and threats from autocratic regimes means that energy security is needed more now than since World War II. Households are suffering under a cost-of-living crisis centred on energy and fuel bills. Rural communities in Pembrokeshire, whom I serve as Member of Parliament, suffer disproportionately because many are often off-grid and rely heavily on heating oil. The Chancellor and Energy Secretary deserve credit for acting swiftly and decisively with financial support and market intervention to support families on top of the wider £150 off energy bills. However, in the face of further geo-political turmoil now is the time to alter our approach to energy to protect families. 

While hard working families suffer, our economy is flatlining and exposed. Economic growth is minimal and our debt is mounting. Drilling in the North Sea and scrapping carbon taxes on British manufacturing would kickstart economic growth, tackle unemployment, and economic inactivity in some of the poorest areas of our country as well as prevent further deindustrialisation. Offshoring our carbon emissions might give some a sense of moral superiority or perhaps relief from guilt, but the fight against climate change is global. Importing oil and gas from foreign facilities that are less carbon-efficient and require long-distance shipping is simply displacing the problem elsewhere and impoverishing our own communities.

Pragmatism and realism must win through – drilling in the North-Sea would be a boon for tax revenue while British manufacturing would become competitive again and prevent corrosive deindustrialisation. The difference between an unjust or just energy transition for my community is the difference between poverty and aspiration. Pembrokeshire is home to one of the UK’s last four oil refineries, which employs around 1,000 workers. If our refinery closes due to oppressive green levies, we will lose the heart of our community. Generations of expertise will disappear and opportunities for a just transition to renewable energy will be lost as the skill base moves elsewhere. Similar community stories are numerous on the shores of the North-Sea. The Labour Party is the party of industry and the unions. We were created in the fire of the industrial revolution. Now is the time to act like it.

Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher 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, but she 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. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the 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 many years.

To equip us to fight a war if necessary, but primarily to keep us out of wars, we need a complete change of direction, beginning with the lifting of the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas. We need to harness the power of the State to 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 clean coal technology, 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. 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. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet 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. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be 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. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

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. 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.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.