Ed Miliband Pledges Legislation to Ban Fracking ‘Forever’
With energy bills heading skywards and renewable energy investment on the ropes, Ed Miliband’s conference crowd-pleaser was to pledge a law to ban fracking ‘forever’ – and sabotage a future Reform administration. Matthew Lynn in the Spectator has more.
He wasn’t able to announce the £300 off household energy bills that was promised during the election campaign. Nor could he unveil any massive new solar farms or wind turbines. Still, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband did have one message to cheer the party faithful in his conference speech today: he is going to ban shale oil and gas for all time. “Let’s ban fracking and send the frackers packing,” he thundered. But can Miliband really do that and outlaw fracking forever? Only a fool would pretend that he can.
Right now, there is a moratorium on extracting shale oil and gas in the UK, which could, in theory anyway, be lifted at any time by a new minister. With Reform pledging to lift it, and way ahead in the polls, that is no longer a far-flung prospect. So just to make completely sure there is absolutely no chance of the UK developing a lucrative new shale industry, Miliband now plans to pass legislation to make it permanently illegal.
The trouble is, that is not going to work. There are two big problems with the planned legislation. For starters, Miliband can’t bind a future Parliament with this law. True, he can make it a little harder for an incoming energy minister to give the industry the green light. He or she won’t simply be able to lift the moratorium and instead will have to repeal Miliband’s new law, which will delay the whole process. The second and bigger problem is this: the case for British fracking is becoming clearer and clearer all the time.
The industry has been booming in the United States, in Canada, and now in countries that are developing new fields such as Argentina, China and Mexico. As more and more countries develop shale oil and gas, and seem – so far – to be doing it safely, it is becoming harder and harder to maintain the ban on it in Europe.
Worth reading in full.
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Couldn’t he impose an indefeasible contract on an organisation that could not be revoked by another, such as a new Government?
No.
A contract is voluntary agreement between the parties signing it, if it is imposed it is a unilateral mandate which could be lifted by a subsequent Government.
In any case, no contract is enforceable under English law which has provisions which a Court would consider unreasonable and/or injurious to the other party.
Surely, ultimately anything that was created by human beings can be undone?
So let’s say the Supreme Court is blocking some process – well, there was a time before the Supreme Court and we were doing OK. So abolish the Supreme Court. Don’t pay their salaries.
AKA Tony Blair’s private court.
There are too many Blair outsourced decision-making committees, and they all need to he abolished and the decision-making returned to Parliament.
The Climate Change Committee should be at the top of the list. It sucking the wealth from the country.
I can foresee a situation where fracking is banned by the current administration in this country, but in a panic to keep the electricity grid running we have to import fracked gas from abroad at a cost many times greater than our own if we’d been allowed to extract it. Miliband is so blinkered by his net zero ideology that he is totally unaware of the real world around him. He thinks we’re leading the world into a net zero Nirvana, but if he turns round to look behind him all he’ll see is dust.
He is, quite simply, mad.
Miliband is aware, he wants to destroy the country’s industries, especially the manufacturing industry.
This urge to ban fraccing, for ever, hints at how well the results of the cancelled test fraccing is expected to be.
This tw#t needs exporting.
No “forever” via the British parliament.
Sent packing to his planet of origin, you mean?
Yes.
Having abandoned him here they’ve probably moved their planet to a galaxy far,far away so he can’t find it….
He lives in a parallel universe. The outrageous claims he made about sceptic policies would, in a sane world, be addressed to him.
The government is clearly convinced, as I am, that a future Reform government will be blocked from all its key policy charges by existing legislation, Quangos, the House of Lords and the Judiciary. It seems clear to me an incoming Reform government will have to ask HM The King to appoint hundreds of additional peers to out-vote the existing body of peers and this will have to be done in the first days of the government. It will be no use waiting for their lordships to delay and ultimately strangle Reform legislation. They will not follow the Addison-Salisbury Convention of allowing through manifesto policies and any that did manage to out smart them would be so long delayed as to destroy the government. The list of legislation to be passed, repealed or dramatically amended now gets longer. It includes authorisation to give notice to leave the ECHR so the Courts cannot claim they have the right to supervise the running of government, HRA, Equalities Act, Constitutional Reform and Governance Act and now the proposed “Everlasting ban on fracking act”. Also a Bill to replace the HoL and put the Supreme Court where it should be – not above the people’s… Read more »
The Great Repeal Act
Which should require very little time to process as it will just be a list of Acts that will be struck off.
Is Reform putting in the detailed work to increase the likelihood of outmanoeuvring the civil service and House of Lords?
That is the question.
And another is, if not, why not?
Yet a govt cannot bind it’s successor.
They can in some circumstances, e.g. some of us do have indefeasible rights created after the Railways Act 1993: https://cdn3.railpen.com/mp-sitefinity-prod/docs/default-source/rayn/guides-for-active-(contributing)-members/guide-to-protected-rights.pdf?sfvrsn=bf5c257_11
It may be that the DESNZ is going to have a pop at implementing some kind of indefeasible rights to make it hard work to undo their policy.
Parliament seemed to find it easy to suspend fundamental freedoms during “Covid” without even passing any new laws- they just abused the Public Health Act which was never intended for the purpose it was used for. They avoided using the Civil Contingencies Act because that required regular debates and votes.
And the Civil Contingencies Act can only be invoked for, I think, two weeks. Extensions need parliament’s ongoing approval, and there is a maximum. Yes, quite right, they didn’t invoke that because it was a lot easier to keep the charade going without it.
Exactly
The CCA was intended for national emergencies, the PHA was not
A week is a long time in politics.
‘Forever’ is just a little longer.
Completely off his trolley.
Bloody evil and traitorous to boot.
Ed Miliband’s conference crowd-pleaser… a sign of panic and desperation. Both for his career, NetZero and the current Labour Government.
Since other parties are proposing to moderate or leave the ECHR and other international legislation it would appear that there is nothing that is impossible to change, merely more or less difficult.
Ban Miliband forever for goodness sake.
… And make it impossible for the Labour party to reinstate him in the future. I bet they now wish they’d done that with Mandelson.
Mad Ed lives in a different universe to the rest of us, humans!
It probably resembles the iconic images in the Matrix films where everything is viewed as being Green.
He needs to be fitted with a straightjacket and locked in a secure padded cell, for his and everyone else’s safety!
An utter nutter.
Every time Moribund opens his mouth he manages to confirm what a fool he is.
Politicans who bwhave like dictators (but he is a communist bstard, so what do you expect) should be arrested, imprisoned for 50 years and then tried. In that order.
The traitorous political class should be out on trial. A Great Treason Trial should be held to hear their crimes against the Brirish people e.g. immigration, net zero, climate change scam, etc. All crimes.
China uses fracking , Russia appears to or has recently started. Well known that Russia has bankrolled anti fracking campaigns. An in depth examination of Milibrains finances is in order.
The UK has been fraccing for decades, IIRC, mostly for Oil.
It’s called “salting the earth” …. so that your enemy (and Two-Tier made it perfectly clear that Reform and the British working class who largely support them are considered to be the enemy) …. find it incredibly difficult to operate in the territory they’ve seized control of.
So Red Ed intends to destroy our economic opportunities and to impoverish those who work in traditional manufacturing …. and ensure as best he can that there’s no way back.
There’s a word for people like him: EVIL. And another: TRAITOR.
There’s another description: failed Arts and Humanities graduates, from both universities.
Some time ago I heard an interview with Ed Davey in which he said, when energy minister in the coalition government., that he had set the upper fracking tremor level equivalent to dropping a melon from waist height so as to make future fracking impossible.
Lancashire, a fracking site, has always had earth tremors.
It’s not just a cast of an improved financial case for fracking but also a technological case. As with all the scaremongering by the climate activists, they base their horror stories on the worst case scenarios of more than 35 years ago. (Miliband and Ed Davey have had their pettifogging hands all over this when they were last in power, that’s how long this has gone on. Fracking as an industry in America has advanced at great speed in the last 25 years becoming vastly more efficient and less impactive on the environment. There is a hugely more solid case for modern shale gas and a more urgent one. But even if we could extract ourselves from the absurd legislative nonsense created by Miliband and Ed Davey, the funding, tracked back to Putin’s grubby hands has created a powerful lobby. Between that and the intractable interference by activists in the Civil Service planning departments would delay implementation for at least a quarter of a century. Think that is hyperbole? How many years ago did we start the last nuclear project? The benefit small nuclear reactor project is that the off the shelf power generators, already a tried and tested technology… Read more »
It would be very easy to repeal any new legislation as it happens. Reform have already promised to repeal the Climate Change Act, so it could simply be included in the Bill to do that.
Is that an opinion of a layman, or a top lawyer?