It's disturbing that Labour ministers ar happyl over industry's death
2024-10-04 05:34
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During the miners' strike of 1984-85, Labour MPs used to proudly wear 'Coal not dole' badges in their lapels. Fast-forward 40 years and coal has never been a more dirty word in socialist circles.
Yesterday, when the boilers of Britain's last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, were shut down for the last time, hardly a tear was shed.
Coal may have been the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution, a phenomenon that transformed the world, but today Labour, in a mad rush to achieve net zero carbon emissions, is presiding over a deindustrialisation of Britain that will leave our country poorer, more vulnerable and won't even do anything to protect the environment.
We can - and perhaps should - rejoice at the decline of coal as a means of producing electricity. It is one of the dirtiest fuels you can burn, producing around twice as many carbon emissions, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, as gas.
Yet there is something rather disturbing about the glee with which climate campaigners, and Government ministers, have cheered the end of the coal industry - and, indeed, the decline of much of Britain's heavy industry in general.
A police officer is led away to an ambulance after being injured in the Miner's Strike in 1984
Moreover, since we closed our coal-fired power stations we are simply not generating enough electricity to meet demand. (Stock photo)
For Ratcliffe-on-Soar is not the only icon of British industry which closed yesterday. The second of the two blast furnaces at Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant was also allowed to cool down for the last time.
Read More
Final blast furnace at Tata in Port Talbot shuts down today as 2,800 jobs at risk
Its closure will mean the loss of 2,800 jobs and no steel will be produced in South Wales until a new electric arc furnace is completed in 2027.
In Scotland, meanwhile, the writing is already on the wall for the Grangemouth oil refinery, whose owner - Ineos - plans to replace it with a terminal to import fuels refined abroad. The company says it has been forced into the move because it is losing £380,000 a day.
Industrial decline in Britain is nothing new. Indeed, it is perhaps the inevitable consequence of scaling the heights we did from the early 19th century onwards.
The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain from a country based on agriculture and handicrafts to one steeped in large-scale industry and factories.
New technologies increased production and made products cheaper. Engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel built bridges, tunnels, ships and railways that were longer, faster and bigger than anything seen before.
Then the rot set in. Lancashire's cotton mills started closing in the 1930s due to cheaper competition from the Indian subcontinent.
Our car industry was failing by the 1970s, brought down by overmanning, rapacious unions, cheap foreign imports and ill-judged state intervention.
Ed Miliband (pictured) - the grandly titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero - has accelerated Britain's deindustrialisation
During the miners' strike of 1984-85, Labour MPs used to proudly wear 'Coal not dole' badges in their lapels. (Labour leader Keir Starmer)
It was much the same story with our steel industry in the early 1980s: out-dated technology, a lack of investment and the soaring cost of coal and oil.
The difference between then and now is that, far from attempting to defend British industry, Government policy seems designed to undermine it.
Read More
Armed police to protect UK's gas terminals amid growing protests by Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace
The new administration's need to show progress towards net zero carbon emissions is giving ministers a perverse incentive to close down UK industry and import goods - because then the emissions will appear on some other country's carbon balance sheet. Fatally, Britain's net zero target is based only on 'territorial' emissions - pollutants physically spewed out in the country itself. It excludes carbon emitted elsewhere in the world in the name of making goods for UK consumers.
Make a ton of steel in Port Talbot and the emissions will be added to Britain's total. Import steel instead, and the carbon dioxide produced in its manufacture will be added to Chinese or Malaysian emissions.
That allows UK ministers to boast they have brought Britain a little closer to achieving its net zero target - but it can hardly be said to help the planet.
On the contrary, it will lead to an overall increase in emissions, because the manufacturing process is more carbon-intensive there than it is in Britain.
Take China. No less than 60 per cent of its power is still generated by coal-fired power stations. Ironically, many of the solar panels and wind turbines which lie at the heart of Labour's clean energy policy are made abroad with dirty electricity. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, China has 654,000 jobs in wind, Britain just 31,000 - in spite of Britain having installed more offshore turbines than any other country. So much for Labour's idea of a 'just transition' to renewables.
Ed Miliband - the grandly titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero - has accelerated Britain's deindustrialisation through his self-imposed target to decarbonise the grid by 2030 - five years earlier than the Conservatives had planned.
The second of the two blast furnaces at Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant was also allowed to cool down for the last time. (Stephen Kinnock, Labour Party MP, poses near Tata Steel Port Talbot steel production plant)
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, China has 654,000 jobs in wind, Britain just 31,000. (A flock of birds fly past turbines)
Until recently, however, Miliband appeared to meet little opposition to his plans in Labour circles. Anyone who questioned his agenda was dismissed as a 'climate change denier' and Right-wing reactionary to boot.
But recently he has come up against a formidable opponent in the shape of Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, who last week branded the net zero pledge 'bonkers' and 'fundamentally dishonest'.
Smith, who represents thousands of North Sea oil and gas workers, added: 'If we don't change course, if we don't get real about what's happening in the energy sector, I fear that over the next decade we will lose up to a million jobs.'
His fears are backed up by Sharon Graham, leader of the Unite union. Both are unconvinced by Miliband's claim that his glorious green revolution will create masses of 'green jobs', not least because Britain's drive towards wind and solar is creating far more jobs abroad than at home.
Smith's intervention came as Government figures revealed that Britain's industrial users pay more for their electricity than their counterparts anywhere else in the world - half as much again as in Germany and four times more than in the US.
No wonder the trade organisation Make UK revealed in July that Britain had fallen out of the world's top ten manufacturing nations for the first time.
UK manufacturing output was worth $259billion in 2022, the latest year for which data is available. That placed us 12th in worldwide rankings, behind the likes of Russia, Taiwan and Mexico.
'This is a major body blow to UK manufacturing,' said Dr Graham Hoare, chief executive officer at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry.
Industrial decline in Britain is nothing new. Indeed, it is perhaps the inevitable consequence of scaling the heights we did from the early 19th century onwards. (Tata Steel in Port Talbot)
'We are home to some of the most innovative manufacturers and research facilities in the world. We must do everything possible to harness this expertise to reinvent ourselves as a manufacturing superpower.'
This is unlikely to happen while Miliband is helming our energy policy. His claim that decarbonising will cut prices and increase energy security is fantasy.
Britain already generates a higher share of its electricity from wind (28.1 per cent in 2023) than any other developed nation apart from Portugal and Denmark - so why do we have the highest industrial electricity prices?
The truth is that, while the marginal cost of wind power might be low, the cost of incorporating it in the grid is very high because of upfront costs and the need for back-up. It's no coincidence that the country which generates most of its energy from wind - Denmark, at 57.7 per cent - has the highest domestic energy prices in the world.
Moreover, since we closed our coal-fired power stations we are simply not generating enough electricity to meet demand. Last year, toptan aydınlatma 10 per cent of our electricity was imported via subsea cables.
If Miliband really wanted to increase Britain's energy security and cut prices he would be embracing a broad mix of sources, not over-relying on wind and solar. He certainly wouldn't be condemning gas to the same fate as coal.
His ideologically driven rush to net zero is condemning much of of UK industry to closure. That might make for a country which, on paper, is cleaner. But it will also make for a poorer and more insecure one, ever more reliant on imports for its basic needs.
Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How An Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (And Won't Even Save the Planet).
LabourChina
Yesterday, when the boilers of Britain's last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, were shut down for the last time, hardly a tear was shed.
Coal may have been the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution, a phenomenon that transformed the world, but today Labour, in a mad rush to achieve net zero carbon emissions, is presiding over a deindustrialisation of Britain that will leave our country poorer, more vulnerable and won't even do anything to protect the environment.
We can - and perhaps should - rejoice at the decline of coal as a means of producing electricity. It is one of the dirtiest fuels you can burn, producing around twice as many carbon emissions, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, as gas.
Yet there is something rather disturbing about the glee with which climate campaigners, and Government ministers, have cheered the end of the coal industry - and, indeed, the decline of much of Britain's heavy industry in general.
A police officer is led away to an ambulance after being injured in the Miner's Strike in 1984
Moreover, since we closed our coal-fired power stations we are simply not generating enough electricity to meet demand. (Stock photo)
For Ratcliffe-on-Soar is not the only icon of British industry which closed yesterday. The second of the two blast furnaces at Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant was also allowed to cool down for the last time.
Read More
Final blast furnace at Tata in Port Talbot shuts down today as 2,800 jobs at risk
Its closure will mean the loss of 2,800 jobs and no steel will be produced in South Wales until a new electric arc furnace is completed in 2027.
In Scotland, meanwhile, the writing is already on the wall for the Grangemouth oil refinery, whose owner - Ineos - plans to replace it with a terminal to import fuels refined abroad. The company says it has been forced into the move because it is losing £380,000 a day.
Industrial decline in Britain is nothing new. Indeed, it is perhaps the inevitable consequence of scaling the heights we did from the early 19th century onwards.
The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain from a country based on agriculture and handicrafts to one steeped in large-scale industry and factories.
New technologies increased production and made products cheaper. Engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel built bridges, tunnels, ships and railways that were longer, faster and bigger than anything seen before.
Then the rot set in. Lancashire's cotton mills started closing in the 1930s due to cheaper competition from the Indian subcontinent.
Our car industry was failing by the 1970s, brought down by overmanning, rapacious unions, cheap foreign imports and ill-judged state intervention.
Ed Miliband (pictured) - the grandly titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero - has accelerated Britain's deindustrialisation
During the miners' strike of 1984-85, Labour MPs used to proudly wear 'Coal not dole' badges in their lapels. (Labour leader Keir Starmer)
It was much the same story with our steel industry in the early 1980s: out-dated technology, a lack of investment and the soaring cost of coal and oil.
The difference between then and now is that, far from attempting to defend British industry, Government policy seems designed to undermine it.
Read More
Armed police to protect UK's gas terminals amid growing protests by Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace
The new administration's need to show progress towards net zero carbon emissions is giving ministers a perverse incentive to close down UK industry and import goods - because then the emissions will appear on some other country's carbon balance sheet. Fatally, Britain's net zero target is based only on 'territorial' emissions - pollutants physically spewed out in the country itself. It excludes carbon emitted elsewhere in the world in the name of making goods for UK consumers.
Make a ton of steel in Port Talbot and the emissions will be added to Britain's total. Import steel instead, and the carbon dioxide produced in its manufacture will be added to Chinese or Malaysian emissions.
That allows UK ministers to boast they have brought Britain a little closer to achieving its net zero target - but it can hardly be said to help the planet.
On the contrary, it will lead to an overall increase in emissions, because the manufacturing process is more carbon-intensive there than it is in Britain.
Take China. No less than 60 per cent of its power is still generated by coal-fired power stations. Ironically, many of the solar panels and wind turbines which lie at the heart of Labour's clean energy policy are made abroad with dirty electricity. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, China has 654,000 jobs in wind, Britain just 31,000 - in spite of Britain having installed more offshore turbines than any other country. So much for Labour's idea of a 'just transition' to renewables.
Ed Miliband - the grandly titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero - has accelerated Britain's deindustrialisation through his self-imposed target to decarbonise the grid by 2030 - five years earlier than the Conservatives had planned.
The second of the two blast furnaces at Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant was also allowed to cool down for the last time. (Stephen Kinnock, Labour Party MP, poses near Tata Steel Port Talbot steel production plant)
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, China has 654,000 jobs in wind, Britain just 31,000. (A flock of birds fly past turbines)
Until recently, however, Miliband appeared to meet little opposition to his plans in Labour circles. Anyone who questioned his agenda was dismissed as a 'climate change denier' and Right-wing reactionary to boot.
But recently he has come up against a formidable opponent in the shape of Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, who last week branded the net zero pledge 'bonkers' and 'fundamentally dishonest'.
Smith, who represents thousands of North Sea oil and gas workers, added: 'If we don't change course, if we don't get real about what's happening in the energy sector, I fear that over the next decade we will lose up to a million jobs.'
His fears are backed up by Sharon Graham, leader of the Unite union. Both are unconvinced by Miliband's claim that his glorious green revolution will create masses of 'green jobs', not least because Britain's drive towards wind and solar is creating far more jobs abroad than at home.
Smith's intervention came as Government figures revealed that Britain's industrial users pay more for their electricity than their counterparts anywhere else in the world - half as much again as in Germany and four times more than in the US.
No wonder the trade organisation Make UK revealed in July that Britain had fallen out of the world's top ten manufacturing nations for the first time.
UK manufacturing output was worth $259billion in 2022, the latest year for which data is available. That placed us 12th in worldwide rankings, behind the likes of Russia, Taiwan and Mexico.
'This is a major body blow to UK manufacturing,' said Dr Graham Hoare, chief executive officer at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry.
Industrial decline in Britain is nothing new. Indeed, it is perhaps the inevitable consequence of scaling the heights we did from the early 19th century onwards. (Tata Steel in Port Talbot)
'We are home to some of the most innovative manufacturers and research facilities in the world. We must do everything possible to harness this expertise to reinvent ourselves as a manufacturing superpower.'
This is unlikely to happen while Miliband is helming our energy policy. His claim that decarbonising will cut prices and increase energy security is fantasy.
Britain already generates a higher share of its electricity from wind (28.1 per cent in 2023) than any other developed nation apart from Portugal and Denmark - so why do we have the highest industrial electricity prices?
The truth is that, while the marginal cost of wind power might be low, the cost of incorporating it in the grid is very high because of upfront costs and the need for back-up. It's no coincidence that the country which generates most of its energy from wind - Denmark, at 57.7 per cent - has the highest domestic energy prices in the world.
Moreover, since we closed our coal-fired power stations we are simply not generating enough electricity to meet demand. Last year, toptan aydınlatma 10 per cent of our electricity was imported via subsea cables.
If Miliband really wanted to increase Britain's energy security and cut prices he would be embracing a broad mix of sources, not over-relying on wind and solar. He certainly wouldn't be condemning gas to the same fate as coal.
His ideologically driven rush to net zero is condemning much of of UK industry to closure. That might make for a country which, on paper, is cleaner. But it will also make for a poorer and more insecure one, ever more reliant on imports for its basic needs.
Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How An Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (And Won't Even Save the Planet).
LabourChina
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