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 I find it bizarre that people oppose the UK producing more of our own oil and gas. By doing so, far from cutting world carbon dioxide output they would increase it. I read of opposition to the development of the  Rosebank field, which would make us more dependent on CO 2 rich imports.   This field has been at the heart of the controversy over new  energy investment in the UK for sometime, with green enthusiasts  claiming we should not go ahead with a good project. This makes no sense. If we fail to produce oil and gas from Rosebank we will simply import it from somewhere else. If we import liquified natural gas it will generate more than twice as much CO2 in the process of compressing it, shipping it and converting it back to gas than simply piping some more home gas down the West Shetland pipe system . These pipelines are already in place with a shortage  of gas to use them.   If we import more oil that too will require more energy to carry it  further by ship from faraway places.

          All those who are impatient to see carbon dioxide reduced should look at it globally. The absurdities of carbon accounting mean if the UK stops producing its own fossil fuels, and closes down much of its energy intensive industries it will claim to have reduced CO 2 , yet total worldwide CO 2 will go up to cover all our imports and the transport they require. The way to decarbonise is to get more consumers to buy electric vehicles and heat pumps to cut their need for gas and oil. When that happens the oil and gas producers will adjust to the reality of the market place. All the forecasts however show a relatively slow take up of the crucial products of the electrical revolution. The global estimates point to the world  needing at least as much oil and gas in 2030 as today whatever the UK does. We should not be arguing that the UK must import everything whilst still being  indirectly very dependent on fossil fuels.

           The net zero policies being urged on government are  damaging to UK jobs, incomes, balance of payments and growth. The Rosebank field itself offers 300 million barrels of oil and 39 million cubic feet a day of gas over the lifetime of the field. It will take an £8.1 bn investment to bring it about with four fifths of that investment spent in the UK, boosting other jobs and incomes. The production of oil and gas will be through a subsea completion tied into a refurbished floating production and storage offloading vessel. Re use of a physical asset already fashioned is a further way of keeping CO 2 down.  This has been converted to run off electricity when supplies of renewable power are available. Why should we turn down this investment designed to keep a bit more oil and gas production and the skilled well paid jobs that go with it here at home? Why would be want to farm this kind of opportunity out to a foreign land and import from them instead? Turning down such an investment also means foregoing large sums in tax revenues, made all the bigger now there are higher rates of corporation tax and windfall taxes for energy companies to pay. Keep these taxes too high for too long and we will lose the opportunity of oil and gas investment at home, which is presumably the aim of some lobbying on this topic.

           The damage of high energy prices, bans on production and penal taxes goes wider into the energy using industries. The UK Emissions Trading Scheme is a tougher version of the EU one, giving the UK the highest  carbon taxes of any major country. This again does not cut world  carbon dioxide output, but shifts where industrial activity can take place. All the time we want to buy steel, glass, ceramics, cement, bricks, petrochemicals and other products that need a lot of energy we will end up importing when UK output  becomes too dear. Our industrial landscape is being progressively shrunk by high taxes and regulations against CO 2 output  at home. We are once again the losers from misleading accounting. Some of the most competitive countries in the world at these products have no carbon tax at all. Even closer competitors in the EU or parts of the US have lower carbon taxes than we deploy. Meanwhile the lobbying in the UK is geared to raising the price of carbon further in a drive to close down much of what remains of our high energy using industries.

            The world does not owe us a living. There are limits to just how much we can import. If we carry on importing so much more than we export, as we did for some years over trade in goods with the continent we will weaken our currency. We also have to sell more and more of our assets to pay the bills, or run up larger borrowings in foreign currencies.  Countries that do too much of that end up in financial trouble and have to cut back their consumption to correct the imbalances. The net zero model for the UK is based around a further large increase in imports. Even the green investments themselves are heavily import dependent, with batteries, wind turbines, steel, lithium, copper and the other sinews of the electrical revolution largely coming from abroad. This is the policy that has launched a thousand  large ships to bring in the imports. A more  balanced policy will bring greater prosperity for the UK, more jobs and investment, and lower CO 2 for the world as a whole.

There is much humbug about independence and diversity. The Bank of England we are told has to be independent. As a result it fails to see an obvious big inflation. Its hopeless groupthink follows the Fed and ECB to inflationary  disaster whilst Asian Central Banks keep inflation  down. It rejects all diversity of view or changes to its models.

There is then the famously independent BBC ,advocates of giving into the  EU and adopting international consensus thinking especially when it is wrong. No airtime to put the case against Quantitative easing or ultra low rates in 2021 or to put the case against excessive QT now as it delivered trouble for the pension funds last autumn. No wish to hear from Brexiteers about how  we could use our Brexit freedoms.

Key posts like Bank Governor and BBC chairman have always been made by the government of the day. Party political bias is not a problem with the BBC, and government telling the Bank what interest rate to set is not a problem. The fixed, limited, narrow and often wrong ways of thinking and forecasts of these bodies is a problem. They need more diversity of thought, and need to consider more independent challenges to their connsensual idiocies.

This is a live topic again in Whitehall as many departments make heavy weather of sorting out the huge mass of EU laws.

I would start with the complex Emissions Trading scheme. Let’s suspend it as energy prices are so high. The UK version produces the highest carbon taxes making UK industry less competitive. Far from cutting CO 2 the scheme drives the closure of UK business and makes us dependent on more imports. That adds transport CO 2 to fossil fuel intensive  output from the exporting country.

Move on to taking VAT off domestic energy and make its removal from green products permanent. Put up the VAT threshold to £250,000 from the  EU £85,000 ceiling to allow more small businesses to expand .Amend the fishing regulations to boost the domestic industry and expand the home fleet.

Change the myriad product specification rules. Keep a strong safety requirement but remove the detail about how you can and cannot make individual items. The ban on various hoovers showed this regulation up as unhelpful to UK business.

I have many more proposals but would be interested to hear yours.

Successive Prime Ministers have not used a lot of Brexit talent on the backbenches.

I raise this now because the current administration is becoming more Remain establishment with each reshuffle. The new Justice Secretary and new Deputy PM are both from the Remain stable. The Attorney General and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are also.

Today the test of Brexit resolve surrounds the EU Retained law Bill. The Prime Minister has always shown good support for this measure. It passed the Commons easily with a majority of 71. It is now stuck in the Lords where there are said to be many critics. If that is so they should be asked to complete their consideration and amendment of the Bill so the Commons can reaffirm its support and get it through, with or without use of the Parliament Act.

The Bill proposes keeping all those EU laws which are valued, where Ministers should bring forward confirmatory Parliamentary action to cement their passage into direct UK law. It  allows the EU laws to cease to have effect where they are not wanted. Some say this is too big a job for the civil service. I say they know these laws as they were usually very keen to get them adopted,. Department by Department they can help Ministers winnow out those laws that  UK Ministers opposed at the time  of their introduction or thought were unhelpful, and those laws which have been found to be unhelpful since.

Growth in advanced countries since the great crash and banking disasters of 2008-9 has been poor. Despite ultra low interest rates and available credit,  growth stayed down. In the last three years the work of the Bank of England, Fed and European Central Bank gave us a big inflation, to be followed by an abrupt change of policy to give us a downturn.

The IMF figures for the period 2010-22 shows the US with 24% growth over 12 years, below 2% a year, with Italy at 1% growth for whole period or zero annual rate. The UK was third at 21% after the US and Canada. The UK was better than Germany (17%), France  (14%) and Japan  (7%) as well as Italy. The UK grew the fastest of all 7 between 2020 and 2022 inclusive.  So all those who say the UK is the worst performer or who say Brexit has done us special damage need to recognise that relatively the UK has done well beating the Europeans and Japanese.

The main reason the US has been more successful is the US fostered and allowed the growth of several trillion dollar companies that pioneered the digital revolution. Europe and the UK did  not produce a Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft. The US university and enterprise culture proved much better able to foster and grow major innovatory corporations that captured the public mood and need, winning business away from traditional companies on this side of the Atlantic. The weight of EU  regulation, UK penalties on self employment, a low tax threshold for VAT and other incumbrances on business hindered UK growth.

We need a policy that promotes more growth in the UK. This needs to be growth in per capita income, not just growth in overall GDP. It is not a good idea to keep adding to the low paid workforce by inviting in more and more economic migrants. The labour shortages should send a signal to employers to spend more on technology and to employ better paid more highly skilled people. So called cheap labour turns out to be very dear for taxpayers, with inflated needs for social housing, extra school places, more medical capacity and expanded utility provision. To foster and allow more growth we need urgent tax changes for the self employed, small business and large companies. It was Ireland that scooped the pool of digital investment this side of the Atlantic, by the simple expedient of having the ultra low business tax rate of 12.5%. That is exactly what the Uk should do, to join the digital revolution more wholeheartedly and to share more of the US digital led success.

This is a  better attempt to answer the outstanding questions over what reductions in EU law have been made for NI under the new Agreement. It appears that most of the items items mentioned are only disapplied for green lane imports, whereas the issue is the application of laws to anything made and sold in Northern Ireland. There seems to have been little progress in reducing the EU legal burden on NI.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (180627):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, with reference to The Windsor Framework: a new way forward, published in February 2023, if he will publish specific details of the 1,700 pages of EU law that will be disapplied under the Windsor Agreement. (180627)

Tabled on: 14 April 2023

Answer:
Leo Docherty:

The UK Government is committed to taking the necessary steps to uphold the UK’s international obligations, including the Withdrawal Agreement and the Windsor Framework, as set out in the previous answer. As also set out, all of the rules disapplied are set out in the legal texts published as part of the Windsor Framework. By the EU’s own calculations, less than 3 percent of EU rules apply – with those that remain only applying to secure maximum free trade and market access for Northern Ireland firms. It should also be recognised that this is not a straightforward list, as some of those rules will be applied in part for the red lane but not applied in the green lane, for example. But, for example:

· Annex 1 of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) legal text shows that 67 rules on food and drink do not apply in the green lane – covering issues like marketing standards, food supplements and additives, and the production of organic products. It also disapplies the certification requirements in the EU Official Controls Regulation, as well as the prohibitions on various movements set out therein.

· Requirements in the Union Customs Code (UCC) for rules of origin certificates, tariffs, and commodity codes for each movement do not apply for internal UK trade; nor are there any requirements for customs declarations for consumer parcels, which are classified automatically as “not at risk”. And we have secured unfettered access by removing any need for export declarations or equivalent information for goods moving from Northern Ireland to Great Britain as would otherwise have been set out in the UCC.

· In a similar vein, and as noted previously, the requirements in the VAT Directive which prevented the zero-rating of energy-saving materials has been disapplied, enabling the changes we brought forward in Parliament this week; as have limits on alcohol duty structures in EU rules harmonising excise duty structures.

· And for medicines we have disapplied any role for the European Medicines Agency in authorising medicines for the UK market, as otherwise set out in EU rules on the authorisation and supervision of medicinal products; and removed packaging any other requirements in the Falsified Medicines Directive.

These changes have safeguarded Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and our internal market, while continuing to support Northern Ireland’s businesses by providing them access to the whole UK market as well as the EU market.

The answer was submitted on 24 Apr 2023 at 17:14.

This is an odd answer. It turns out 3% was an EU calculation, not a UK government one. There is still no back up or workings shown to tell us how this percentage was calculated.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (180625):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, on what basis his Department calculated that only three per cent of EU law would apply to Northern Ireland under the Windsor Agreement. (180625)

Tabled on: 14 April 2023

Answer:
Leo Docherty:

The EU’s calculation is that less than 3% of EU law is applicable in Northern Ireland.

The answer was submitted on 24 Apr 2023 at 17:09.

Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (180629):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, whether his Department plans to fund carbon capture and storage projects from (a) tax revenue, (b) levies, (c) charges on energy customers and (d) other sources. (180629)

Tabled on: 14 April 2023

Answer:
Graham Stuart:

The £20bn announced in the 15 March Budget will come from levy and Exchequer sources. The precise mix will be confirmed once negotiations are complete. The Government expects it to encourage billions of pounds of additional private capital as private partners also commit to the programme, creating jobs and bringing investment to the UK’s industrial heartlands.

The answer was submitted on 24 Apr 2023 at 16:27.