Why Labour are going to make same mistakes as SNP over net-zero zealotry

Where was Graham Norton when we needed him? I can’t say I’m a fan of jingoistic Olympic opening extravaganzas and a bit of pomposity-pricking wouldn’t have gone amiss, particularly when the notably unathletic blue-painted Smurf chap and his weird chums were impersonating the Last Supper.

The four-yearly one-upmanship contest has all got a bit much when the basic point of it all is the introduction of the athletes and the lighting of the torch. But the French got so carried away with themselves that the athletes were denied their place in the big parade and had to put up with a Seine cruise in the pouring rain like millions of tourists. And it turns out the flame, so movingly lit by a trembling Muhammad Ali to open Atlanta 1996, isn’t a flame at all but a B&Q-style, ecofriendly scoosh of water over some LED lights.

But then again perhaps the French have produced the perfect metaphor for our times, in which nothing can’t be sacrificed on the altar of climate change; the planet is dying, there is no planet B, and all that guff used, like the Olympic opening ceremony, to justify the acceleration of drastic and potentially ruinous policies in the pursuit of global one-upmanship.

Except only western democracies are competing, as oppressive regimes with a common anti-West agenda burn and trade fossil fuels with abandon. The last British coal-fired power station will close this year, while last year China was responsible for 95 per cent of new coal power construction.

Hysterical activists

As Chancellor Rachel Reaves yesterday used an apparent £20bn “black hole” in the Treasury books to explain away all the things she can’t do and the tax rises she can impose, it didn’t include a re-think about the £8.3bn her government plans to spend in the next five years on the creation of GB Energy, primarily a private investment vehicle which won’t actually produce any energy itself, and which is highly unlikely to lower household bills as promised any time soon.

Business chiefs in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen launch public bidding war over GB Energy

Sir Keir Starmer put GB Energy at the heart of his industrial strategy in a speech delivered in a Runcorn factory last week, only a minute’s EV charge away from the Stellantis/Vauxhall electric car plant at Ellesmere Port, but next door to the vast Stanlow Refinery, once owned by Shell and now operated by Essar Energy Transition, which produces 16 per cent of UK transport fuels.

Like Aberdeen, industrial Merseyside is the power conundrum writ large: go too slow and Stellantis is threatening to close its plant because the electric car market is struggling, go too fast and the threat is to thousands of oil and gas jobs, 900 of them at Stanlow alone. As hysterical activists tried to stop holidaymakers jetting off from Gatwick yesterday, there’s no getting away from the fact that transport and distribution relies on fossil fuels, and gas is needed when renewables are still.

Wildest of promises

But there’s no hint of a reconsideration of the 2030 target for de-carbonising the electricity grid or Labour’s promise that GB Energy would “deliver 100 per cent clean power” by then. Given over 75 per cent of the UK’s energy needs come from oil and gas − and the record contribution of renewables to the UK energy mix still meant 49.1 per cent of UK electricity generation in the first quarter of this year came from non-renewables − this was the wildest of promises, if not a wilful deception.

Until recently, Labour was claiming GB Energy would “save £93 billion for UK households”, but there was no mention of this in last week’s speech, just as, curiously, there was no mention of climate change either. When the original plan was to spend £28bn on GB Energy, sticking to the 2030 decarbonisation target seems like an act of deliberate self-harm, perhaps borne of a belief that the Conservative Party is in such disarray that by the next election, when it’s clear this central “ambition” was always pie-in-the-sky, it won’t matter a jot. So much for Sir Keir Starmer’s “raw honesty”.

But with zealous Energy Secretary Ed Miliband in charge and with a huge Commons majority, for better or worse, GB Energy is happening, with windfall tax raids on North Sea oil and gas to prime what looks suspiciously like a re-run of the hideously expensive PFI schemes which the Blair-Brown government used for infrastructure investments.

North Sea exodus

The Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce was only doing its job by highlighting the risk of increased taxation to £30bn of investment and £20bn of tax receipts by 2029, with chief executive Russell Borthwick warning confidence within the sector was at “rock bottom” and that “our path to net zero could look more like a road to nowhere”. It was no contradiction for the Chamber to argue the case for GB Energy to be headquartered in Aberdeen, but even if it does win the contest, as seems likely, it will be scant compensation if the tax plunder results in a North Sea exodus.

In Runcorn, the Prime Minster kicked off his speech by claiming the GB Energy policy was “not driven by ideology” and at least the plan does include nuclear, but in doing so it makes the £8.3bn over five years look even more paltry when both the new Sizewell C plant in Suffolk and Hinkley Point C in Somerset might yet cost £50bn apiece.

But calling a halt on new oil and gas exploration while opening the door to unrestrained onshore and offshore wind developments, and the associated landscape-scarring infrastructure construction like high pylons and vast battery storage farms, isn’t anything but ideological.

Just saying something isn’t ideological because it’s necessary doesn’t mean either is true, as the SNP found to its cost from its calamitous association with the entirely ideological, anti-growth Greens, and from which it is finding it impossible to retreat. Like the fake Olympic flame, warm words don’t heat homes when the wind doesn’t blow in winter.