Alan

'If he's creating a support package, that's going to be done with taxpayers' money' Kemi Badenoch was critical of Starmer's plans to address rising energy bills ahead of his chairing of a Cobra meeting on Monday 'I'm very concerned that everything they touch they make worse'

Ed Miliband has a cult-like conviction in his own climate ideology. He is incapable of admitting that he is wrong – even with mountains of evidence stacking up against him. As the world gets more dangerous, his anti-North Sea fanaticism is making Britain weaker and poorer. Unfortunately, as more and more people sound the alarm, Miliband only becomes more convinced by his own righteousness. Today, the Conservatives will force a vote in Parliament calling for the emergency approval of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea – two fields that could be up and running by the end of the year. Turning our backs on domestic gas that could heat millions of homes would be madness in normal times, but it is sheer lunacy in the midst of a gas supply crisis. In government, I legislated to protect North Sea oil and gas licences and I approved Rosebank, even though I was told it would have put my own personal security at risk from climate extremists. It was controversial at the time, but to say times have changed would be an understatement. From the wind lobbyists at RenewableUK to the chair of Great British Energy - Miliband’s “clean energy” propaganda outfit - the head honchos of the green lobby say we should drill. The great and good of the Labour Left, from the Tony Blair Institute to the unions and Ed Balls, say so, too. The relative geopolitical stability we have had for most of my adult life is not something we can bank on in the years ahead. We need to pass on a country to the next generation that is strong and prosperous. That means making economic decisions based on rationality, not ideology. The North Sea is a blessing for our economy. When gilt markets are charging you a premium because they think we’re borrowing too much and earning too little, it is incumbent on the Exchequer to make the most of all growth opportunities we have. It is a blessing for our energy security, with the gas making up half of our domestic supply. But it is also a blessing for our environment, as the North Sea is much cleaner than importing LNG from abroad. However, for Miliband to admit this would expose the intellectual fraud at the heart of our net zero climate policy. Miliband’s agenda rests on the absurdity that carbon emissions only matter if they happen domestically. It incentivises the replacement of British industry with dirtier imports from abroad. The fact that North Sea gas displaces dirtier LNG doesn’t matter to our climate bean counters because foreign LNG imports aren’t counted in our domestic emissions targets. This is Net Zero irrationality in a nutshell. Fewer jobs in Britain for more carbon in the atmosphere – and yet to the religiously fervent, they will argue that this is Britain’s example of climate success. This is fantasy thinking we cannot afford. We must fast-track Rosebank and Jackdaw and lift the onerous bans and taxes on the North Sea to back Britain’s energy security. Kemi Badenoch knows it and Keir Starmer knows it. Unfortunately, so far, only one of them has had the courage to say so.

Dear Labour, We, the British electorate, already delivered our verdict on the Tories on 4th July 2024. We sacked them. Job done. So perhaps it’s time you stopped flogging that particular dead horse and blaming them for every single one of your own catastrophic decisions. Because let’s be brutally honest: your predecessors set the stage for national decline long before the Tories even got their feet under the table. Thirteen years of Blair-Brown hubris – illegal wars sold on lies, open borders, sky-high immigration, the destruction of our manufacturing base, and the slow poisoning of British identity – laid the foundations. Then came fourteen years of Tory chaos, incompetence, and broken promises. And now? In less than two years, you’ve managed to outdo the lot of them. You’ve taken the mediocrity, the betrayal, the lies, the economic vandalism, and the sheer contempt for the working people of this country, and you’ve turned it up to eleven. Congratulations – that truly is a historic achievement in failure. So here’s some free advice from the taxpayers currently footing the bill for your ideological experiments: shut the fuck up about the Tories, stop the endless excuses, and for the love of God, stand down before you do any more irreversible damage to the hard-working men and women of the United Kingdom. Because at the next General Election, we won’t just vote you out. A proper British tsunami of patriotic fury is coming – and when it hits, decades of smug, out-of-touch, nation-wrecking mediocrity will finally be washed away for good. Yours, in weary but growing rage, A very fed-up Brit. JV 🇬🇧

In part it’s because the U.K. Chancellor has so little headroom after spending her first 20 months in office spending and borrowing like a euro millions lottery winner. Vapour thin headroom means every move in forecasts is amplified.

If we want ordinary people as candidates for the Scottish Parliament, rather than the usual intake of airbrushed politicos, we can’t punish them for every unguarded thing they’ve said in the past. 80% of our candidates have never been politicians before, so have not been as careful as the usual would-be MSP. Yet still, the media have shown desperation, taking comments out of context and even picking out individual words to try and put them in a misleading light. Today, some of our candidates were even smeared by the media for being in an unofficial Facebook group of people who sympathise with Reform – a group not even owned or moderated by the party, which has over 13,000 participants and over 20 posts per DAY – for a handful of comments made by random other people in it. Our candidates had an inkling of the treatment they'd get at the hands of the media, and I hold them to a high standard for things they say and do as candidates. But I’ll not give in to such desperate smears. It’s all just Holyrood’s cushy club in action, terrified that we’re about to stop the gravy train in its tracks. They'll soon need to grow up, because we’ll be bringing some common sense and decency for a change.