Conservatives Are Not Taking Energy Policy Seriously
There is probably not a soul outside of SW1 who does not by now recognise that there is a catastrophic problem with Net Zero. From most people’s experiences, the fundamental issue is the matter of cost – energy bills. They have not come down, and the Secretary of State’s promises are being exposed as hollow almost as soon as he utters them. For their part, the opposition have made some superficial concessions to reality, making some valid criticisms of the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero policies along the way. But deeper inspection reveals that they have too little to say about the broader policy agenda and that their thinking owes less to rational energy policy than to deference to the usual suspects who created the mess.
“Britain needs to double down on nuclear”, tweeted Ed Miliband’s opposite, Claire Coutinho on Wednesday. According to Coutinho, Britain built the world’s first nuclear power plant without being constrained by “absurd environmental regulations”. “If Labour were serious about growth, they’d back our plans”, she concluded.
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One great mystery in all this is the sudden conversion of Boris after he became PM. Before that, he frequently rubbished the whole climate scare; once in Downing street, he ramped up the Net Zero race to destruction. Many people think his wife was the main reason, but is it plausible that a man would wreck the country to please his wife?
Johnson is notorious for endorsing the opinion of the last person he spoke to. The last person most married men speak to each night is their wife.
is it plausible that a man would wreck the country to please his wife?
Johnson? Yes.
Nail on the head there. Carrie was in charge, and her dad Matthew Symonds was a founder of The Independent, about the most fierce supporters of net zero.
Just as an example their website says “Households could save hundreds of pounds a year on energy bills by shifting away from ‘volatile’ fossil fuels, climate advisers say.”
We are talking about Johnson here, the man who wrote two press articles about Brexit to cover both outcomes of the referendum. Clearly not a man of conviction.
A similar mystery conversion happened to Rishi Sunak who used to be very critical of Net Zero until he attended to first COP happening which apparently caused an outright damascene conversion. Badenoch’s statements about how “climate change” would be real but needs to be deal with in a different way (read: by Tories and not by Labour) should also come to mind here.
The sad reality is probably Das hat mit seinem Klingen nur der Piaster getan¹.
¹ Quote from Karl May’s novel Durch’s wilde Kurdistan, referring to the wondrous effectiveness of bribing the right officials at the right time, This accomplished, just with its sound, the pound. Piaster refers to the most common coin in the Ottoman Empire at that time.
I resigned as a member when Sunak about turned on fracking. It was the last straw, in many last straws.
Better late than never I suppose.
He was read in, on what would happen to the country if he didn’t go along with the dog and pony show.
Because that’s the only way he could be assured of a ‘bj’
He had a sudden change of heart/mind regarding “covid” too. Almost as if he were a puppet with someone else’s hand up his rear end.
It is because the lying oaf Johnson is actually an ignorant moron who covers this up by having a haystack hairstyle, spouting bits of Greek and Latin and impressing gullible people – Tory party members – into seeing him a jolly good chap. The man – not unlike Farage – does not do detail which for anyone in an important role is a drawback. Style over substance has damaged the UK for years.
Possibly though I don’t do detail either and it seemed pretty obvious to me that “covid” was a load of nonsense. It might be all part of the act but it looked to me like his instincts were to treat it with the disdain it merited, and then he changed his mind, as did Whitty and Vallance.
In the Fat Oaf’s case, yes I think it is. But don’t forget that his father is also a raging Eco Nutter …. and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
We all remember “Vote blue get green”.
‘….the Climate Change Act needs to be repealed, Net Zero cancelled and the Green Blob evicted from Westminster.’
Until the Conservatives confront the real verifiable numbers, the hopelessly inaccurate climate models, the lack of any credible science supporting the argument that man made CO2 is driving climate change, they will remain a rump, quite possibly destined to extinction.
The people in SW1 know very well about the calamity – but it’s not a calamity for them.
The morning was going quite well until I saw that photo. What a drippy, soppy utterly WET nonentity she looks. Has she ever said anything remotely meaningful? Just another example of the appalling standard of the current MPs.
Kayfabe – not a term I’d come across before but so accurate. “Dweebish wonks” helped improve my mood.
Yet another Ethnic Indian with a classic smug expression, an investment banker wearing a hard hat, lecturing Britons on energy policy for their islands. Just like her fellow Ethnic Indian Millionaire Sunak wore a hard hat while pretending to “help” brickies lay bricks on a British building site, to promote himself as a “man of the people”.
”There is probably not a soul outside of SW1 who does not by now recognise that there is a catastrophic problem with Net Zero.” The most striking thing about that sentence is the word “now”. A blind man on a galloping horse could see Net Grifto was a catastrophic problem in the making. When the grid was over 50% coal and the most of the rest was gas with some nuclear, the UK had no energy problems. So… why do we now have energy problems (rhetorical) and wouldn’t they be solved by going back to coal and gas – nuclear is too expensive for the tastes of private investors, so let’s not just swap subsidy harvesting of wind/solar for subsidy harvesting of nuclear. The Hinckley Point C débâcle finally is having taxpayer cash thrown at it as it has doubled in cost and is over a decade late – and has a guaranteed, inflation linked, lifetime price of £128 per MW. That’s not cheap – it’s up there with wind. Ironically EDF is part of the consortium to build it, but has recently been renationalised because it cannot raise the required private investment to cover the cost of replacing France’s… Read more »
Nuclear actually works though, providing power when you actually want it, vs renewables ‘when the sun shines and the wind blows’. Like it or not, gas and coal pollute more… we could use them shorter term until nuclear is built out of course – so much quicker to build.
We were lumbered with the nasty little Coutinho by the Tories because she was mates with Sunak and is also an Indian – a catholic from Goa. No previous MP experience or any real business experience. East Surrey is safe Tory country but were it not for just too many not sure of Reform and voting anti-Tory with Labour we could have been rid of her. Coutinho and her Tory pals crashed in on our Jubilee Party and abused the hospitality by having other people set up a table and gazebo and decorate it all, and then arriving late and going before lunch was served. Of course leaving others to clear it all away – fair to say as a PR exercise it was a disaster. She popped up at the agricultural show pre election to judge horses allegedly but having come from Twickenham that seems unlikely and she was not there last year…post election. Well done for pointing out that like Ester Mcvey she has been a member of the Tory eco-nutter group. As energy secretary she seemed to have made history, turned water into wine, and planted a magic money tree by claiming that increasing the auction price… Read more »
Here’s an interesting article I just found from “The Times of India”, celebrating this fact:
Indians made up highest number of immigrants to Britain last year – Times of India
“Indians made up the highest number of people — 250,000 — to immigrate to Britain in 2023. Of these, 127,000 Indians came to work and 115,000 Indians came to study, and 9,000 came for other reasons. The next largest nationality to immigrate were Nigerian, Chinese and Pakistani.”
“18,664 Indians received care worker visas, making them the largest recipient, and over half the nurse visas (11,222) went to Indians.”
“50,053 graduate visas went to Indian nationals, making them the largest nationality. Indians also received the highest number of study visas.”
…And now Starmer has just bowed to Modi’s demand for 500,000 more Indians to be accepted into the UK. That’s half a million.
And for another interesting comparison, the whole of the UK (population 65 million people) is about the same geographical size as just ONE of the 29 states of India: Uttar Pradesh (population 204.2 million people).
29 States Of India Vs Countries Of Equal Size & The Population Difference? Shocking!
The Conservative part of the Uniparty are history. Why do we keep giving them page time?
As someone who fills in the regular poll by ConservativeHome on the state of the Conservative Party, it has a question on whether the failures of the last 14 years should be questioned or should one move forward from any further recriminatory thoughts.
My view is that the Party should be held to account and one of the biggest faults was their wholehearted support for Net Zero and for which my wife and I have turned to support Reform.
Their failure to understand the damage they have caused and continue to cause by their ridiculous support for such a disastrous policy makes them, for me, completely unsupportable.
It is frequently stated by climate alarmists that more CO2 means a hotter Earth. But CO2 cannot create heat. There is no more heat than the Sun provides (ignoring geo-thermal energy). So adding more CO2 to the atmosphere does not create more heat. Once that fact is understood, climate alarmists fall back on the “insulator” or “blanket” theory of the Earth’s atmosphere. All objects whose temperature is above absolute zero, including all air molecules, radiate heat energy randomly. Which means that CO2 molecules in the air don’t “trap” heat at all, because the heat is radiated. The opposite of what climate alarmists claim. What happens to that radiated heat energy? It simply raises the temperature (a bulk property) of the surrounding molecules of air. The absorption and radiation at particular wavelengths is irrelevant to that basic mixing of heat energy which CO2 molecules, like all the other gases in the air, perform. Science is not magic. I may be chancing my luck somewhat, but added to the above two facts, the fact that heat energy only flows from warmer to cooler, is pertinent. The Earth’s surface, warmed by the Sun, can radiate heat energy into cooler air. But the reverse… Read more »
“… the Climate Change Act needs to be repealed, Net Zero cancelled and the Green Blob evicted from Westminster.”
absaflockinglootly. Nigel should put that in his next manifesto.