Labour’s pledge to cut consumer energy bills by £300 was an election campaign centrepiece. Yet the promise began to unravel this week even as it was launching Great British Energy – its flagship project aimed at achieving lower bills.
During the election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, repeatedly said their controversial plan to decarbonise UK electricity by 2030 would reduce household bills by £300.
But when challenged in the Commons on Friday and in interviews, both men refused to repeat the pledge. Miliband admitted that any reduction might take years to deliver.
Replacing cheaper generation with more expensive generation and having to upgrade the system to do it to boot. It’s unlikely to produce consumer savings now, is it?
“But when challenged in the Commons on Friday and in interviews, both men refused to repeat the pledge. ”
There’s no need for pointless repetition. A gentleman’s word is his bond. I’m sure they are just getting on with providing that cheap clean green power, and haven’t got time for idle chit-chat.
Anyone who voted Conservative under Boris, but not for Rishi, brought this on us, deeming getting rid of the useless party more important that letting in the truly nasty party.
Witchie. This was already Tory policy under May. Initiated by Cameron the husky hugger. Tory uselessness has a long & growing history
I know from experience that politicians are more stupid than most people could believe, but even I am amazed at Miliband. Does he genuinely believe he can destroy civilisation and yet HIS life will carry on serenely as before?
I’m no expert but I think his policies will mean that the UK will be unable to produce steel? So best not get a tumor Ed, because cutting it out with a wooden stick is probably going to be a bit messy. And mining all those materials for our lovely EVs is going to take ages with a small twig. You can’t cut down a large twig with flint…
Anyone who still voted Conservative rather than Reform has only prolonged the pain.
Both main parties are hell-bent on open borders, net zero madness, endlessly pouring money into the nhs, all-round wokery, remaining subservient to the EHCR and tax increases – subtle and not so subtle as in freezing allowances year after year.
But no, we couldn’t possibly support that awful man Farage could we?
A comment over at Paul Homewoods’ site:
“Ed Miliband is going to spent £8.5billion of taxpayers money to save the 24.8million households £300 …but his plan will cost £343 per household ….madness”
You could have looked at the promise of the Labor party in Oz to lower electricity bills by $200 odd when they got into power.
Strangely enough, it didn’t happen. But of course UK Labour is a noble and upright mob, not like those wicked Aussie bastards!!!
Why did people vote Reform? Because it was the only way of getting rid of Rishi 🙁
The tories were as keen on net zero as labour. The only communication I got from my ex-MP during the election was about how great it was. They only have themselves to blame.
“Anyone who voted Conservative under Boris, but not for Rishi, brought this on us, deeming getting rid of the useless party more important that letting in the truly nasty party.”
Yes because the Tories were sooooo dead set against Net zero weren’t they?
If you voted Conservative all you’ve done is create an ‘Opposition’ that agrees with everything that Labour want to do, just maybe disagrees on the timings. And that will now spend all its time over the next Parliament fighting like rats in a sack over who will be king of their dunghill, rather than opposing anything, which it can’t because its agrees with it all anyway.
If on the other hand all the Conservative voters had voted Reform we’d now have an opposition that could actually oppose Labour from a position of actual disagreement, backed by a democratic mandate of more votes than Labour got.
@Boganboy
Do you still take our criminals?
If the yanks took piers morgan, wonder if you could find space in your hearts (and one of your more picturesque deserts) for a criminal incompetent?
It could be a fact finding sabbatical (40-50 years should be enough) to find out from the Abo’s about the stone age standard of living he seems so keen on.
I’m not sure what to say to someone who doesn’t like expensive and unworkable ‘green’ energy plans, but also voted Tory.
Tim
Surprised you missed this – ‘When evil collides’ – Richard Murphy praises Nesrine Malik:
Nesrine Malik has a powerful article in the Guardian this morning in which she discusses the normalisation of the genocide in Gaza, as represented by the multiple standing ovations in the US Congress for Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu last week.
As she notes:
[This normalisation] looks like accepting that there are certain groups of people who can be killed. That it is, in fact, reasonable and necessary that they should die in order to maintain a political system that is built on the inequality of human life. This is what the philosopher Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics” – the exercising of power to dictate how some people live and how others must die.
Necropolitics creates “deathworlds” where there are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”. In those deathworlds the killing of others, and the destruction of their habitat through epic military capabilities whose impact is never experienced by the citizens of the countriesresponsible, confer even more value on the humanity of those in the “civilised” west. They are exempt because they are good, not because they are strong. Palestinians die because they are bad, not because they are weak.
And as she concludes:
The result is a world that feels as if it’s in the jarring middle of that transition. Where political events move forward with speed, folding Gaza into the normal. …
What world emerges after this? The war on Gaza is simply too big, too live, too relentless for its forced normalisation to occur without unintended consequences. The end result is all of humanity degraded; the end result is a world in which when the call comes to aid people in need, no one will be capable of heeding it.
Why refer to this, apart from highlighting the obvious quality of Nesrine Malik’s thinking, writing and humanity?
I had four reactions. First, that I am not mad to not accept this situation. None of us should.
Second, my revulsion at Netanyahu’s reception is justified.
Third, that this is how fascists work. They want us to accept that the elimination of the ‘other’ is normal when in reality it is not just abhorrent; it is also a crime.
And fourth, we need to shout about this. So I am.
I think he has confirmed he could very well have been at Dachau – as an employee.
@Jim,
While I agree with your sentiment, the simple fact is that if every conservative vote had gone to Reform, Labour would still have got in. Tories were totally useless, but Labour is nasty. You have a choice to make, and people took it. This isn’t support for Tories, it’s speaking truth about Labour. Rupert has a point, and so does BiS. For Reform to be a government it also needed all the people who stayed at home.
The underlying problem that shafted the Tories up the arse to begin with is that the majority of their MPs are/were Remainers, and not obeying the voice of the electorate took all their energy. Boris wouldn’t have been much better in the long run, but Covid brought about his downfall quicker than the machinations of Remainer MPs. Sure, the Net Zero nonsense is a disease in Parliament, but there was an underlying malaise. The Tories have been a bit like a syphillitic patient with cancer and plague, dying of a heart attack, but not before they infected the whole hospital …
Don’t discount the millions of 2019 tory voters that just stayed home this time. Reform now has to work on convincing those, as well as the red wall voters where they’re currently in 2nd place to labour.
Reform didn’t split the tory vote, you can’t split what doesn’t exist. The tories destroyed the tory vote, watching it vanish like morning dew on a summer’s day.
but even I am amazed at Miliband. Does he genuinely believe he can destroy civilisation and yet HIS life will carry on serenely as before?
You’re amazed, eh? The Miliband clan have been trying to destroy the English since we made the mistake of offering Papa Miliband asylum.
Offering him an asylum sounds good. But unfortunately they’d all been closed down by then.
“Reform didn’t split the tory vote, you can’t split what doesn’t exist. The tories destroyed the tory vote, watching it vanish like morning dew on a summer’s day.”
Exactly. If Reform didn’t exist, I still wouldn’t have voted Tory, I wasn’t going to vote for that traitorous bunch of arseholes if you paid me a million quid. I’d have stayed at home.
@Witchie
Anyone who voted Conservative under Boris, but not for Rishi, brought this on us, deeming getting rid of the useless party more important that letting in the truly nasty party.
I’ve twice been a party member (each time I quit in disgust), and I have canvassed at elections. I have always voted Tory – not naively, but on the basis that you outline above.
I voted for Johnson – as did my student kids, at their first ever vote. They must have been rarities.
We gave them an 80 seat majority and they gave us a squandered Brexit, Black Lives Matter and zombie knives on the streets, endless immigrant boats escorted in by the Royal Navy, policemen in rainbow cars dancing at ‘Pride’ events and swaying gently at ‘Carnival’, children mutilated by insane doctors, and the Covid lockdowns and associated horror and waste.
That is all pretty ‘nasty’.
And it was all on top of their common or garden failures to do stuff like keep the potholes filled, cut waste and expenditure, run schools and hospitals properly (yes, I’d prefer them to fuck off out of it, but if the majority of my fellow countrymen insist on such things being run by the idiot State the least they can do is make a decent fist of it), and allow me and mine a little peace and quiet, and the freedom I inherited as an Englishman.
No more.
It is beyond stupid to vote for a party merely because its candidates are wearing the blue skin-suits of earlier generations.
This country is headed for Enoch Powell’s vision, come what may, and I have two choices. Vote for the people who let it happen, or not vote for the people who let it happen. I chose the latter.
It may happen slightly quicker under Labour, though I think we have hit terminal velocity now, but that just hastens the collapse, after which there is a slight chance of some sort of rebuild.
I suspected it under the Tories, but have had it confirmed by Labour. We no longer live in a democracy, but in a kakocracy, a government of the most inept, stupid, people, one can find.
We no longer live in a democracy, but in a kakocracy
Ding! Ding! Ding! Winner.
Britain has no sovereignty, which is why we don’t have a functioning democracy anymore. There are 644 MPs in the House of Commons doing everything they can to keep our country under the thumb of foreign interests who hate us on a biological level.
It is a “Resignation-worthy Offence” to lie to the House of Commons. There are NIL penalties for lying in an election manifesto.
How can anyone be surprised that Labour Ministers side-step requests to repeat their ridiculous promises in the House of Commons?
Why did people vote Reform? Because it was the only way of getting rid of Rishi
That might well have been the thinking of some, but the fact is that if every person who (like me) voted Reform had voted Conservative instead, it would still have been a bloodbath and Rishi would still have had to go. Maybe Labour would have a majority of under instead of over a hundred, but that makes very little difference.
@ Van Patten
In Gaza genocide *of the Jews* has been normalised for more than half a century
@ Chris Miller
If you had all voted LibDem it would still have got rid of Rishi.
even I am amazed at Miliband. Does he genuinely believe he can destroy civilisation and yet HIS life will carry on serenely as before?
I’d go along with Steve. I met the Miliband tribe at a wedding. They belong to a circle of intellectual left wing Jews infest London. It’s was the daughter of one of them’s wedding. Supposed playwrite. Although not enough so to actually make a living. (The groom was a BBC producer!) All of that lot are utterly detached from reality. Because they so rarely interface with it. Most of them seem to be, in one way or another, living off the taxpayer. Education, grant funded arts, charities, funded this & that, all the usual things. There’s a few on the periphery don’t. But they’re in the regulatory capturing professions.
@Boganboy, the promise in Oz was $275 less for electricity. Dunno about you, but my bill has more or less doubled since the ALP said that. And Blackout Bowen is still in charge of his ministry (for Brits, our equivalent of Miliband).
They announced their $300 rebate for this financial year for everyone, but lo and behold, our government can’t even give away money. Our first installment has been delayed until end of August, which means I won’t see it until the next bill in November.
Mark
No sorry. We’re too busy taking in crims from the rest of the world to take yours from the UK.
Ltw
Can’t remember how much it’s gone up by. But my leccy bill certainly hasn’t gone down. Not that I expected that it would.
Now if they’d just stop pissing away cash on Net Zero, and imitate our Asian neighbours by burning lots of our good old coal, we’d have the nice cheap energy we used to. Maybe even our industries might not be going bankrupt.