DOMINIC LAWSON: Grotesque Labour hypocrites are hammering our economic system with Net Zero madness whereas letting different international locations off the hook
When Rachel Reeves, panicked by her own corrosive effect on economic growth, suddenly declared the Government would now back a third runway at Heathrow, Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, was incandescent with fury.
Pointing out that Keir Starmer himself had campaigned against the project in 2018, she raged: ‘Now, in the middle of a climate emergency, his government is backing it. A complete U-turn at the expense of local communities and the planet. Reckless, short-sighted and indefensible.’
But now Sultana (sitting as an independent, having been elected as a Labour MP) turns out to be an avid advocate of new runways… in Pakistan.
Last week, she was one of 20 parliamentarians, led by the Labour MP for Bedford, Mohammad Yasin, who wrote a joint letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, demanding that he get on with constructing an entirely new international airport in the city of Mirpur.
On British parliamentary notepaper, the letter declares: ‘We wish to draw your attention to a very important matter to the Kashmiri diaspora in the UK… the nearest airport to the region is Islamabad International, approximately 80 miles by road from Mirpur. Significant numbers of our constituents have concerns regarding the journey time by road.’
Fun fact: Mohammad Yasin also voted against the expansion of Heathrow in 2018. And, like Sultana, he is not a London MP – so his reasons for opposition could only have been the claimed effect ‘on the planet’ if we were to increase airport capacity.
Yet, somehow, these MPs immediately abandon such concerns about the supposed dire threat to humanity from jet fuel carbon emissions, when their vexed constituents ‘from the Kashmiri diaspora’ complain about having to drive 80 miles from Islamabad to Mirpur.
It’s mystifying why MPs who otherwise seem to regard flying as a crime against the environment, want to make it easier to take long-haul flights to and from Pakistan. Or not mystifying, just grotesquely hypocritical.
Zarah Sultana (pictured) is one of 20 parliamentarians who wrote to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, demanding that he get on with constructing a new airport in the city of Mirpur
They were led by the Labour MP for Bedford, Mohammad Yasin. Fun fact: Yasin voted against the expansion of Heathrow in 2018
Or maybe something else lies behind the egregious double standards – the idea that only the UK should be hamstrung economically by an obsession with ‘Net Zero’, and that the emissions of formerly colonised countries are above criticism or complaint.
For in recent months, prodigious increases in coal production from the world’s two most populous nations, China and India, have passed entirely without comment, let alone censure, in the House of Commons.
Last week, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, hailed the country’s record-breaking coal output, and the country’s minister for coal and mines, G Kishan Reddy, rejoiced on X: ‘India has crossed a monumental 1 BILLION TONNES of coal production! This achievement will fuel our increasing power demands, drive economic growth and ensure a brighter future for every Indian.’
In China, coal plant construction surged last year to the highest level in a decade, aided by generous new government terms, which allow 50 per cent of the capital costs to be offset via a levy on consumers’ bills.
The UK, meanwhile, has closed its last coal-fired power station (previously the source of our cheapest energy) and instead gives such incentives to ‘renewables’. These ‘environmental levies’, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, will amount to over £12billion this year alone, and are to rise inexorably in the years ahead.
This helps to explain why our industrial energy costs are the highest in the world, and – in turn – why British Steel is about to go out of business, leaving us the only major economy without steel-making capacity. And yes, we will just buy it from China, where it can be made using all that cheap, reliable coal.
The craziest aspect is that the imported steel will have led to higher global emissions than if we had produced it ourselves, with a much lower coal element, and no transportation costs. So our de-industrialisation is actually ‘bad for the planet’, as global emissions are increasing as a result.
This thought had never occurred to the fanatics known as Just Stop Oil, who last week announced that they were ending their campaign of disruption, while adding ‘this is not the end of civil resistance’.
What? Does that mean they will be taking their protests to China? After all, that is where the vastest growth in emissions will be coming from (the UK is now responsible for little more than 1 per cent of made-made CO2).
Obviously not, and partly for the same reason that those MPs criticise UK airport expansion but promote it in Pakistan. It is only the West that is wicked, and former colonisers’ carbon emissions are infinitely more heinous than those of the formerly colonised.
Some tribute here should be paid to the last government, which brought in Serious Disruption Prevention Orders [SDPOs], giving the police added powers to prevent the sort of activity that led to main arterial roads being blocked, resulting in havoc to millions of lives. At that time, Just Stop Oil raged that ‘SDPOs stifle democracy and free speech’.
No, they did not curtail free speech in the slightest; and if Just Stop Oil wanted to understand the difference, they could try going to China to speak out against the plans for increased coal production there.
The truth is that the Just Stop Oil campaign became absurd – as well as menacing to the public held hostage by their attempts to close vital infrastructure – with the election of a Labour government which had exactly the same policy. That is, to close down all new exploration and development of our untapped oil and gas resources.
There was not a sliver of difference between Just Stop Oil’s objectives and those of Ed Miliband, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Energy Security (ha!) and Net Zero.
And what’s Ed’s latest brainwave? A ‘maritime decarbonisation strategy’, under which all boats would have to become fully ‘electric’. And the same for canal barges and pleasure craft, whose owners will have to swap their diesel engines for electric motors and (enormously heavy) batteries.
The chief executive of the association representing the smallest fishing boats (less than 10 metres in length) said last week that Miliband’s scheme would ‘destroy the industry overnight’.
Now, I want you to guess, roughly, what Miliband’s spokesman said in response. Yes, the usual fatuous grandiloquence: ‘The Government is committed to decarbonising the shipping industry as part of our mission to tackle climate change and establish the UK as a clean energy superpower.’
You might also be wondering: how does Rachel Reeves square her Heathrow plans with this doctrine? She says it will all be fine because ‘renewable fuels are a game-changer’.
Well, that’s true, but not in the way she means. According to Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, ‘one calculation suggested it would take the oil of three million coconuts to fuel one flight from London to Amsterdam’.
Which may be something for Zarah Sultana and her colleagues to work out on the back of a House of Commons envelope: how many coconuts will be required to fuel all their constituents’ flights to Mirpur and back?
Just to save the planet, of course.
