Kelly’s Eye
THOUGH it doesn’t figure specifically among the six platitudes – sorry, pledges – issued by Keir Starmer to waves of indifference last week, Labour remains committed to the fantasy of turning the UK carbon neutral by 2030.
Never mind the fact that renewables are nowhere near ready to replace oil and gas. Or the fact that to meet such an absurd target requires forcing millions of people to beggar themselves to change their cars and home heating for replacements they don’t want.
Interestingly, it appears that Labour’s paymasters in the big unions agree with that analysis. Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, has launchd its “no ban without a plan” campaign to oppose Starmer’s policy of refusing licences for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.
She says: “There is clearly no viable plan for the replacement of North Sea jobs or energy security”, and adds: “North Sea workers cannot be sacrificed on the altar of net zero.” Amen to that. While there are some very strong vested interests making fortunes from the headless rush to renewables and the entirely arbitrary deadlines set, the promised avalanche of new green jobs fails to materialise, while the workforce in the UK oil and gas sector has plunged from 117,900 to 74,100 in a decade.
The unions’ members are at the sharp end of that decline, so it’s hardly surprising that its leaders are going in to bat on their behalf. Sticking up for your own people – now there’s a novelty in British politics. Labour’s stance, by contrast, has more in common with a Green party that today harbours in its ranks a bizarre mix of trans biology-deniers and a growing “Allahu Akbar” tendency of Israel-haters, instead of the more harmless yurts and tofu types of the past. If the Conservatives hadn’t been so complicit in similar eco-excess themselves (cheerleader-in-chief: B. Johnson), they’d be able to turn it to their electoral advantage.