Recent winters have been tough for pensioners, but they won’t have anything on this one. All the cost-of-living payments that former Tory PM Rishi Sunak approved have expired, while chancellor Rachel Reeves has scrapped the Winter Fuel Payment for 10 million pensioners.
Labour’s own research shows that this will plunge 100,000 pensioners into fuel poverty. Charities warn 4,000 could die as a result.
PM Keir Starmer and Reeves refuse to backtrack, despite the energy cap jumping in October and again in January. Instead, they keep blethering about their black hole and blaming the Tories.
But one man in government reckons he has the solution. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is convinced he knows how to solve our energy crisis once and for all.
While most of the Labour front bench act like they’re in politics for the freebies, Miliband is different. He’s a man on a mission.
A Clean Energy Superpower Mission, in his own modest words.
Today, he blamed the rise in the energy price cap on the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Miliband said: “As long as Britain remains exposed to the rollercoaster of global fossil fuel markets, we will be vulnerable to energy price rises over which we have no control.”
Which is a fair point.
He added: “The Government’s clean energy mission is the only way to take back control of our energy, with cheaper and more secure power, out of the grip of dictators like Putin.”
I hope his heroic words will warm the hearts of the nation’s shivering pensioners, because it’s the only part of their bodies they will warm.
Miliband’s claim that his planned transition to clean energy will cut domestic gas and electricity bills have been publicly debunked, but he keeps making it.
And he is so convinced that his plan to run the UK on zero-carbon electricity by 2030 will work that he’s already declared it a resounding success, six years before he’s begun.
Incredibly, his first step was to block new drilling licences for UK North Sea oil and gas.
That’s dirty energy, you see.
Although not as dirty as the fossil fuels we’ll have to import once Miliband has barred us from producing our own.
In their place, he’s going to plaster the countryside with wind turbines, solar panels and 600 miles of pylons. I guess we need to do something with all that land once Starmer has driven off all the farmers.
Miliband is also going to blow £21.7billion on unproven carbon capture and storage technology, that’s never actually worked, anywhere.
He’s even going to drive up the cost of installing gas boilers and force people to buy noisy, expensive heat pumps instead.
Miliband is making his pricey renewables push at a time when the oil price low and set to plunge even further as US president-elect Donald Trump’s “drill, baby drill” policy ramps up global supply.
So while the rest of the world pays even less for their energy, we’ll pay even more for ours.
Given that the UK is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, this won’t do anything to save the planet. But it will make the UK a colder, poorer place. Especially for pensioners. That’s some plan, Ed.
