Ed Miliband is ramping up his Net Zero zealotry, despite the blackout chaos that the failure of wind and solar brought to Spain and Portugal this week.
So no surprise there, then.
Two years ago, when Labour was still in opposition, Miliband released a bizarre video in support of his quasi-religious climate crusade. I missed it at the time and only caught up with it yesterday.
It featured Mister Ed standing in front of a wind turbine in a field near Mansfield, strumming a guitar and singing a couple of lines from Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.
Well, I say ‘singing’. Caterwauling might be a much better way of describing it. He made Dylan sound like Luciano Pavarotti.
Don’t take my word for it, though. You can check it out on YouTube. Anyone who did stumble across it back then would have been justified in calling social services.
Miliband resembled someone who had just been released from the Puzzle Factory and was now serving the rest of his sentence in the care of the community.
Last time I saw anyone behaving in similar deranged fashion, he was wandering the concourse at King’s Cross railway station shouting at strangers about the End Of The World being Nigh.
Miliband was sporting a blue puffa jacket but looked as if he should have been wearing one of those padded numbers which button up at the back and are secured by straps and buckles.
Nurse!
Come to think of it, the End Of The World isn’t far wide of the mark. Miliband’s message was essentially that we are all going to burn in Hell unless we abandon fossil fuels immediately and rely on wind power.
In the scheme of things, if his ranting was confined to a field in Nottinghamshire, or even the concourse at King’s Cross, it would be no big deal. And the internet is overloaded with crazy videos posted by assorted single-issue headbangers and conspiracy theorists.
Two years ago, when Labour was still in opposition, Miliband released a bizarre video in support of his quasi-religious climate crusade
The problem here is that while Miliband is right up there with the swivel-eyed End Of The World Is Nigh brigade, he’s now in a unique position, as Energy Secretary, to put his mad policies into practice – with a vengeance.
This week he’s been doubling down on his kamikaze mission, despite mounting resistance and all available evidence demonstrating the consequences of enforcing carbon-free targets in a truncated time frame will be economically catastrophic.
Everyone from former PM Tony Blair to the trades unions who bankroll Labour have been warning that Miliband’s madness threatens jobs, economic stability and energy security.
Blair, even though he started rowing back yesterday, said Labour’s Net Zero policies were ‘doomed to fail’.
The unions are horrified at the widespread job losses caused in manufacturing by the soaring cost of energy – which Miliband had falsely claimed would fall sharply. Gary Smith, head of the GMB, described the Government policies as ‘bonkers’.
Yet Mister Ed, and Surkeir – who continues to prop up his far-Left North London neighbour – still pretend that he’s acting in the national interest.
A Downing Street spokesman this week insisted risibly that Miliband was doing a ‘fantastic job’ and ‘winning the global race for jobs of the future and securing people’s energy bills’.
As I wrote on Tuesday, these people lie as naturally as they breathe. Who the hell are they trying to kid? Certainly not the thousands of workers at the now defunct Vauxhall van plant in Luton, or the sacked Grange-mouth Refinery workers, or the steelworkers now chucked on the scrapheap as a result of the highest energy prices in the developed world, artificially inflated by Net Zero.
Nor the 200,000 people in Scotland whose jobs depend on the North Sea oil and gas industry, which Miliband is hell-bent on closing down.
His lunacy and fanaticism have been well documented in this column and elsewhere. In probably his most demented act yet, Miliband even ordered concrete to be poured into fracking wells so they can never be exploited. This is nothing short of sabotage on a criminal scale.
The biggest beneficiaries are the Chinese, who are flooding the British market with cheap electric cars and even sacred wind turbines, all manufactured using energy generated by filthy coal.
Here’s how rip-roaring bonkers Miliband’s crusade really is. Even Norway, a friendly country, is warning him not to abandon gas and oil. While he’s determined to eliminate drilling for fossil fuels, Britain is importing oil and gas from Norway – all extracted from the self same North Sea reserves we are shutting down.
Where’s the logic in that? The Government is paying Norway billions of pounds for gas and oil we could be pumping from our own waters.
Meanwhile, as Britain teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, Norway grows richer and uses some of its abundant sovereign wealth to buy up vast chucks of real estate in London.
Go figure, as our ‘drill baby, drill’ American cousins say while laughing their heads off at our suicidal stupidity.
As for energy ‘security’, I refer you to the TV series Occupation, which imagines Norway annexed by Russia. Drama, perhaps, but in light of pipeline vulnerability, the war in Ukraine and the widespread instability in the world, does anybody still seriously think depending on imported energy is a good idea?
Miliband belongs in a padded cell, but for now he’s got the British people in a suffocating straitjacket instead, facing ever higher energy bills and economic ruin. This ain’t just an ecological shakedown, this is the road to Hell.
There are noises off suggesting Surkeir will, at some stage, get rid of this Net Zero nutjob. But the damage is already done and will take years to repair, assuming Labour can be bothered to change course.
Right now, we’re lumbered with Ed Miliband, tilting at windmills and insisting that the future is Blowin’ In The Wind. That’s his version and he’s sticking to it. With apologies to Bob Dylan, here’s mine:
How many pits must a man close down
Before we run out of coke?
How many North Sea oil rigs must shut
Before the UK goes broke?
Yes, and how many windmills must the countryside take
Before it’s beyond a sick joke?
Disaster, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
Disaster is blowin’ in the wind.
Yes, and how many more must be dumped on the dole
Before the worm starts to turn?
Yes, and how long will we go on importing foreign coal
As if we’ve got money to burn?
Yes, and how many times will the lights go out again
Before this madman will learn?
Disaster, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
Disaster is blowin’ in the wind.
Yes, and how much higher will our gas bills have to go
So Miliband can play superhero?
Yes, and while the economy goes up in flames
Mister Ed fiddles madly like Nero,
Yes, and how many old folk will die from the cold
In futile pursuit of Net Zero?
Disaster, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
Disaster is blowin’ in the wind.
