ANDREW NEIL: Ed Miliband’s Net Zero mania is not only a risk to vitality safety. It’s making us so reliant on China, he is now a risk to nationwide safety

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband justifies his dogmatic dash to decarbonise our national electricity grid by claiming it will free us from dependence on the fossil fuels of foreign dictators.

The more our electricity is generated by renewables like wind turbines and solar panels, his argument goes, the less we’ll need to rely on oil and gas from autocratic regimes who control supply (and, to a lesser extent, price) in their own interests.

It is a beguiling assertion – nice if it was true. It is regularly peddled by the growing army of green grifters with an axe to grind and a begging bowl to rattle as they top up on the billions in subsidies, doled out at our expense, to those providing the renewables, at little financial risk to themselves.

In reality – as with almost everything Miliband touches in his zealous pursuit of Net Zero – it is so full of stuff and nonsense that it’s hard to know where to start unpicking it.

So let’s begin with a simple fact: we stopped using oil to generate electricity years ago. More renewables will have no impact on our demand

for oil. As for natural gas, on which we still depend for electricity generation, almost 60 per cent of what we import comes from Norway which, last time I looked, was a prosperous social democracy, not a dictatorship.

America is our second biggest natural gas supplier. Not that long ago we imported no gas from the US. Then came the fracking boom, turning America into a net exporter of oil and gas.

Today over a quarter of the gas we import comes from the US, arriving by ship in high-tech liquified natural gas carriers, to be turned back into gas on arrival. America, of course, is also a democracy.

The only dictatorship from which we import a reasonable amount of gas is the Gulf state of Qatar, nominally a friend. But we’ve been reducing reliance on Qatar for some time now and it accounts for only 6 per cent of our imports these days. We could easily replace it with more gas from America, as Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ energy policy increases American fossil fuel production and exports.

Or, more sensibly, we could source more from our own gas fields in the North Sea. True, the North Sea is well past its peak when it comes to oil and gas production. But it still supplies almost 30 per cent of our domestic gas needs – and that’s even after we export a fair chunk of its current output. 

If licences were issued to exploit what remains of our gas (and oil) reserves, the North Sea could continue to make a meaningful contribution to our gas supplies – without recourse to Miliband’s foreign dictators.

But he will issue no new licences for oil or gas. What fossil fuels are still under the North Sea will be left there. Labour is continuing with a windfall tax on our declining offshore energy industry long after any windfall profits have disappeared and regulating it out of existence by refusing any further development. 

Yet just about everybody, bar Miliband, understands we will need gas for electricity generation for the foreseeable future. So perhaps we’d better not be too rude to these foreign fossil fuel dictators just yet.

In fact, far from freeing us from the need to cosy up to nasty autocrats to keep our homes warm and our appliances running, Miliband’s dash to decarbonise the grid by 2030 will put us in hock to the biggest dictatorship of all: China.

Miliband aims to treble solar power capacity before the end of the decade, which will involve carpeting 180 square miles (about 30 square miles bigger than the Isle of Wight) with solar panels.

He has already approved three huge new solar farms in eastern England, despite the official planning inspectorate concluding that one in particular would involve an unacceptable loss of productive farmland.

But when it comes to Miliband’s Net Zero mission, nothing is allowed to get in the way, not even food security. Or British jobs for that matter. For, when it comes to paving the countryside with solar panels, there will be precious few jobs for British workers. All the panels will come from China.

Chinese manufacturers now account for 80 per cent of the global supply of solar panels – and an incredible 98 per cent of those already installed in Britain. Indeed China is churning out so many there is now a global glut of these panels, piling up in ports and warehouses all over the place. So much so that farmers in Holland and Germany are using then for fencing.

Miliband, in his 2030 rush to decarbonise, will not be able to resist using China’s over-production of panels as a cheap and plentiful supply to fulfil his Net Zero mission. 

America has already slapped tariffs on Chinese panels and the European Union is looking to do the same, in response to what is effectively Chinese dumping in Western markets. But not Britain. We have no plans for tariffs because nothing can get in the way of whatever can facilitate Miliband’s Net Zero crusade.

There will be jobs as Britain rolls out its massive expansion of solar power. Just not British jobs. Chinese jobs –though not the kind any self-respecting Labour government should be happy with. The Xinjiang region in north-west China plays a pivotal role in Beijing’s solar panel supply chain.

It is there that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs produce the polysilicon solar panels needed in what are effectively slave labour conditions.

The Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University reports that labour is rounded up from rural villages, herded into camps where, behind barbed wire, steel gates and an array of security cameras, they toil for little or no pay, the local police confiscating their ID cards, without which you cannot travel in China.

The British Parliament has accused China of genocide in Xinjiang, given its in-human treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs.

None of this seems to matter to Miliband. The march to Net Zero cannot be impeded. The US and the EU are devising laws to ban the purchase of solar products made by slave labour. The British Government has no such plans. The grid must be decarbonised.

Needs must, you might say, if we are to deal with the so-called climate emergency and save the planet. Except that, even if you accept the more outlandish claims of the climate catastrophists, there is nothing green about Britain installing solar panels made in China.

Almost 60 per cent of China’s electricity generating capacity comes from coal-fired power stations. A new coal plant was even opened in the Xinjiang region in 2008 to provide the cheap energy solar panel production requires (our industrial energy costs are four times China’s). It is a major reason China is so competitive when it comes to solar (that and, of course, workers either aren’t paid or get a pittance).

Yes, China is rolling out renewable power – wind turbines, solar panels, hydro-electric dams – at pace. But that largely meets rising demand for electricity. It is not eating into coal’s share.

The International Energy Agency forecasts every year that demand for coal in China is about to turn down. Every year it is proved wrong. Its latest forecast is more in line with reality. 

It says global demand for coal, led by China (which uses more coal than the rest of the world put together), has reached a new record high this year and will stay at this level or more for at least the next three years.

Coal, let us not forget, is the dirtiest way of generating electricity. Yet China is still opening a new coal-fired station roughly every week. 

The idea that even a large expansion of solar farms in Britain could reduce CO2 emissions by anything like enough to compensate for the huge emissions China continues to spew out every year making these panels is fantasy energy policy. But then Miliband’s energy policy is driven by fantasy.

For all his enthusiasm for freeing us from the clutches of dictators, when it comes to fossil fuels Miliband seems strangely unconcerned about tying us to yet another Chinese supply chain – one that uses slave labour – provided it furthers his green agenda.

But then the Labour Government regularly indicates it is in the market for appeasing China if it can see some kind of economic advantage (like cheap solar panels). This is a risk to national security which I fear Keir Starmer does not appreciate. China has mounted a massive programme of infiltration and influence-peddling in most major democracies, nowhere more so than Britain.

Its tentacles spread into our universities, businesses and public life. Ken McCallum, head of MI5, has called it a ‘sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale’. Its aim, over time, is to undermine our resolve, cohesion and power. It is, in MI5’s view, the biggest threat the UK now faces.

Yet Starmer is curiously slow to do anything about it.

The previous government passed the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). Though never explicitly stated, its clear purpose was to counter the activities of Beijing’s insidious United Front Work Department, which works closely with China’s Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s top spy agency.

Yang Tengbo, Prince Andrew’s Chinese pal, was almost certainly working for United Front. His mission was to schmooze the upper echelons of the British establishment, report back anything he might glean and put a pro-China word in the right ears.

His royal connections got him in front of two prime ministers (David Cameron and Theresa May, both patsies for the Chinese).

FIRS would require those working for a foreign government to declare their lobbying role or face criminal prosecution. It was based on an Australian law designed to combat Chinese Communist interference and infiltration. Vitally, it included an enhanced tier of countries thought to be the highest risk to security, to allow greater scrutiny of the activities of countries like China.

Yet Labour shelved the scheme after it came to power, claiming it needed more work. Ministers talk of it coming into force next year but 10 Downing Street is cagey about China being in the enhanced tier.

It’s almost as if Starmer doesn’t want to do anything to annoy the Chinese. Chancellor Rachel Reeves heads to Beijing next month to discuss ‘economic and financial cooperation’.

That’s already proceeding fast when it comes to Miliband’s Net Zero strategy. As well as solar panels, China is a massive producer of wind turbines but, unlike solar panels, most are installed in China to increase its wind capacity.

But Miliband wants the Chinese to build floating offshore wind farms in the North Sea, so desperate is he to increase UK wind power. The company he’s wooing has already been banned from Norwegian supply chains because Oslo feared the Chinese would snaffle all the technology involved.

As America and Europe look to tariffs to protect their car industries from an onslaught of cheap Chinese electric vehicles, Britain plans to keep its borders wide open.

Why? Because to meet his Net Zero targets Miliband needs a massive uptake of EVs and only China can make them cheaply enough. If that means the destruction of our automotive industry than so be it. We will be further down that magical road to Net Zero.

The car industry will surely be saved, I hear you say. Really? Our steel, fertiliser and chemical industries have already been sacrificed at the alter of Net Zero, which has given us the highest energy costs in the world and made energy-intensive industries uneconomic in the UK. So why would the car industry not be consigned to the knackers’ yard too?

According to the prestigious Royal United Services Institute, China already has a ‘near monopoly’ of the rare minerals supply chains need to meet Net Zero targets. Miliband has concluded that, given China’s dominance in EVs, solar panels, rare minerals, batteries and wind turbines, his Net Zero obsession cannot be satisfied without embracing Beijing closely.

In doing so he raises the stakes way beyond his pay grade. His policy is no longer a threat just to energy security. He is now a threat to national security. That cannot be allowed to stand.