Kick in the bills
WITH energy infrastructure now being targeted in the escalating Iran conflict, we are staring down the barrel of a huge global price shock.
And Britain — heavily dependent on imported energy because of unreliable wind and solar, and the Government’s obsession with Net Zero — is more exposed than most.
Yet, even as gas prices soared by 25 per cent yesterday, Ed Miliband wasn’t for budging. Britain’s largest oil field, Rosebank, could be producing millions of barrels a day by the autumn.
Shell’s Jackdaw gas field has enough to heat 1.6million homes.
Miliband is refusing to sign them off.
At the same time, he has banned all new drilling in the North Sea, while Norway opened 45 new wells last year.
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Energy prices will be £300 higher by September, according to the boss of energy supplier EDF.
Billionaire chemicals boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Octopus energy chief Greg Jackson, Asda chairman Lord Rose, the GMB union and even the head of RenewableUK have called for North Sea reserves to be reopened urgently.
Miliband isn’t listening.
If the war on Iran and this level of market turbulence continues, Brits face the very real prospect of energy and fuel rationing later this year.
We have gone way beyond the point where Miliband’s dangerous green ideology should be allowed to trump common sense.
Covid chaos
THE latest report from the Covid Inquiry inevitably makes for grim reading.
Millions of non-Covid patients had appointments and operations cancelled. Cancer deaths spiralled upwards.
Six years on from the pandemic, the NHS is still crippled by waiting lists, which have climbed from 4.24million before the first lockdown in March 2020 to 7.16million today.
No one doubts Britain was unprepared for such a catastrophic event. But this inquiry was supposed to identify how we can avoid making the same mistakes during the NEXT deadly virus.
Baroness Hallett claims prioritising Covid-19 over other health services was wrong.
She also says that ex-PM Boris Johnson’s decision to tell people to stay at home to protect the NHS cost lives because some believed services had effectively closed down.
What else did she expect ministers to do at the onset of a pandemic about which next to nothing was known?
Even her own report says the NHS was almost overwhelmed to the point of collapse.
And her previous report said lockdown should have happened quicker!
So which is it?
Far from helping us to learn important lessons, this £300million inquiry has become a vast blame-game — from which the main beneficiaries are its handsomely paid lawyers.
