THE Shadow Business Secretary has said the Chancellor should have used the global energy crisis to “stare down Ed Miliband” and reverse Net Zero policies.
Speaking on GB News Andrew Griffith said: “I listened extremely attentively [to Rachel Reeves’ statement]. I thought there might be some substance there. I thought if there was ever a moment this government would reverse its disastrous policy, many of them on energy; support businesses, which, without business, we’re not going to get any growth. We’re not going to get the revenues that will allow us to spend more on defence, for example, this was the moment with the oil price up at over $100.
“And then from the very first words out of her mouth about having made decisions to put the economy in a resilient shape, well, she’s done precisely the opposite. She’s hollowed out British business. Unemployment is rising. She hasn’t reversed Ed Miliband’s disastrous energy policies.
“So I think, like a lot of us, we were aghast. It’s as if she’d gone to an AI, a ChatGPT, and said, ‘Give me a statement that has no substance in it whatsoever, that I can make at the dispatch box for 20 minutes.’
“We won’t get those 20 minutes back.
“There are going to be higher interest rates which means, because of the additional debt, we’re going to be spending even more money on interest. That’s less money that we’ve got to spend on defence.
“The forecast, anyway, had very little headroom. She’s been running along, living from forecast to forecast and hasn’t reflected all of the economic risks in that.
“This would have been a reasonable moment for a reasonable person to say, look, we’ve been running on one particular course. The world has changed. We’re seeing some really quite exceptional macro events: remember, 20% of all of the world’s oil, effectively, all of the world’s energy is flowing through that very narrow choke point that’s now closed to ordinary commercial traffic.
“If nothing else, if she just wanted an excuse to change her mind and stare down Ed Miliband and her other green loons in her cabinet.
“If you want one tiny glimmer of hope, it’s that the Chancellor and other G7 chancellors today got together and said it would be a really good thing if we could release oil from the global reserves and add some supply to the market.
“And I would simply say, well, if that makes sense, to reduce the oil price and give us lower energy on one day of the year, wouldn’t it be a really good idea to do that every single day of the year by turning on those taps again in the North Sea, where we’ve got our own reserves trapped in those rocks.
“We could have abundant oil, we could have abundant gas, but we could do it every day of the year. We don’t have to get on the phone to the G7 to increase supply and lower prices.
“It’s a market like any other, like housing, like any in the market for food. And even if you’ve swallowed the green Kool Aid, there’s lower carbon intensity from taking the oil from the North Sea, piping it onshore, than there is from shipping it halfway around the world as well.
“I’m not a reflective politician that immediately thinks the answer to everything is the state, which is just you and I by another means, pouring taxpayers’ money in. We do have the ability to wait and see.
“I don’t support the price cap, but the price gap mechanism gives the country the rest of the quarter to see what happens to long term energy prices.
“But there are people particularly in markets like heating oil, particularly those that rely on their car to get to work, something we want people to do, maybe take the kids to school, maybe they’re carers for their family and they are worried about that.
“And whilst I think the ordinary common sense British people recognise government is not always the answer, and it doesn’t have a magic money tree, it’s still negligent for the Chancellor to come to the House of Commons to purport to be taking decisive action in this crisis, offer a big fat nothing burger and refuse to reverse some of the most damaging economic policies on energy that are actually making it worse, not better.
“So it’s not about a position of neutrality. This is a government that is still metaphorically digging us further into the hole on energy.”
