'Ed Miliband betrays a wanton abandon towards energy security and is playing fast and loose with national security' - Sir John Redwood

He welcomes the end of the jobs in South Wales making steel in blast furnaces. He looks forward to the closure of the Scunthorpe steel making capacity, and to the termination of more high energy using plants around the country.

It is all part of the upside down world of this government. They are keen to tell us how bad everything is, and then propose making it worse.

The old fashioned ideas that government is proud of our country and its achievements, and out to make things better, have been jettisoned.

All this is done in the name of net zero. Ed Miliband and his dwindling band of supporters claim the UK must be the leader or pioneer in the world at shutting down anything that needs coal, oil and gas to meet customer needs.

He says that as we close our facilities so the rest of the world will follow.

The country that gave the world the prosperity, growth and jobs of the industrial revolution will lead the world away from those technologies by ending many of them.

The trouble is this theory does not work. Now the UK has closed every coal fired power station down, China and India do not say they will follow suit. Germany too carries on for much longer with many coal power stations.

Sir Keir is unable to persuade his new friend the German Chancellor that they too should immediately close all their coal stations. China and India open new ones to meet the demand for industrial products, swelled by the UK’s need to import more.

Far from lowering world CO2 by deindustrialising at home, the UK adds to world CO2 by adding CO2 from marine shipping. We need to bring industrial products half way across the world to us as imports to replace lost home production.

The foreigners gain the jobs and tax revenue we have lost, and we are dependent on their continued goodwill to receive these crucial products.

Ed Miliband says he is concerned about energy security, yet he betrays a wanton abandon towards it. It does not matter how many more wind turbines he adds to the grid . Come days and hours of no wind, we will not have the energy we need.

He has not come forward with comprehensive plans to store the power from windy and sunny days for the cold dark evenings when we will still need electricity.

He is going to have to rely on gas power stations he would also like to close, and thinks he can lecture or price people into not using so much power when the sun and wind go on strike.

He is also playing fast and loose with national security. Relying on steel imports would make weapon production difficult in a crisis with enemies attacking shipping lanes or preventing foreign supply.

He also says he is concerned about our energy bills. He shows a strange way of dealing with that, confirming a 10 per cent price hike in household average bills soon after arriving in office.

This is despite the addition of large new capacity of wind and solar in the last few years. Like many believers in the desirability of wind power he overlooks the great extra cost of needing to hold gas fired stations in reserve for when there is no wind, ignores the initial subsidies and favourable prices offered to bring on the wind investment, and assumes more windfarms will be forthcoming at lower prices for power.

Have you noticed how Labour has gone quiet on the pledge to cut £300 off bills? They are not willing to say when and how as they watch costs go up.

Mr Miliband committed the UK to all clean electricity by 2030, which presumably means carbon free. Then he asked how this could be done and how much it might cost, reversing the usual process of making decisions after you knew all the relevant facts.

Shutting a coal power station when you might need it on stand by is a risk. Hoping the wind blows enough with power at a price we can afford is not a policy that can withstand contact with reality or with the weather.

He is cursing us with some of the highest priced electricity in the world and the prospect of more closures of industry to come.

He tells us those losing jobs will find better paid ones in green industries. Has he noticed how China has already sewn up the solar panels, wind turbine and battery car markets?

Has he seen that far from the UK dominating these new products we simply import more of everything from steel to electricity as we cease to bother to make enough for ourselves. Mr Miliband’s policies are bad for jobs, lose us tax revenue, and are bad for the environment.

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The import model means more world CO2 and less growth and prosperity at home.

I am glad, in an exception to gloom, Labour has taken pride in announcing again the decision of Black Rock to invest £10bn in a data centre.

The irony is Mr Miliband’s passion to close down power stations that work is leaving us short of power to be able to switch on more new data centres.

To promote growth you need reliable and affordable energy. When will the Net Zero Secretary actually cut our bills instead of talking about it whilst putting them up? When will he attract enough domestic power to enable us to keep and grow our traditional industries?

Mr Miliband is creating a net zero industrial graveyard where once we made our own steel, refined our own fuel, extracted our own energy and generated our own electricity.

You must not turn a whole economy into an industrial museum. You cannot pay the bills and create the jobs we need with our current destructive energy policy.