Net Zero policies are self harm and self defeating

I have long opposed the policies to stop us buying and making new petrol and diesel cars, and imposing high carbon taxes. It is wrong  to rely on  importing oil and gas instead of getting more of our own domestic gas and oil  out of the ground and wrong to  give grants to farmers to wild or to cover land with solar panels which would otherwise grow food. These are policies which succeed in boosting world CO 2 whilst closing down our factories and farms. They are self defeating in their own carbon counting terms, and self harming on a huge scale as we see the surge in closures and lost jobs they cause.

If Mr Burnham is serious about re industrialising he needs to rebuild our oil and gas industry, re open our refineries, scrap our carbon taxes and emissions charges. He is more likely to go the other way. He wants to give in to the EU more, so that means accepting their higher carbon taxes, their carbon tariffs and emissions trading scheme. These will all add to the closures and job losses Starmer has been racking up.

Kemi Badenoch rightly says to Conservatives we need to oppose these policies. Rumour has it that Burnham may do a bad deal with Miliband and  his net zero disaster machine to allow the Jackdaw gas field to go ahead, but not Rosebank. We need Jackdaw, Rosebank, and all the rest. We need to start up exploration again. Importing LNG weakens our economy, exports tax revenues that we could have for ourselves, and loses us well paid paid jobs. It generates more than 3 times as much CO2 as getting our own gas out and sending it by pipe to UK customers. There is likely to be plenty more gas under our feet and under our seas that we could get out without environmental harm using modern techniques of deviated drilling and reservoir management.

Mr Burnham will soon find out the hard way that government entails making choices. You cannot have a policy of re industrialising without scrapping the crazy net zero attacks on UK plants and energy. You cannot have a policy of faster growth and a policy of closer alignment with the EU, as EU alignment means higher taxes, more EU charges and taxes, and more EU rules to lose us business. Being in the single market gave us slower growth. Cosying up to it will help them take more market share away from our farmers, energy producers and manufacturers.