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David Lammy made his first Foreign Secretary speech at Kew yesterday telling us the overriding problem of our times is climate change. This is “the most profound and universal source of global disorder”. Recognising many of us might think the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, or the terrorist attacks against shipping might be important , he went on “The threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental”.  Pandemics are apparently more likely if it gets warmer. All extreme weather of whatever kind is down to CO2.

There was no evidence to back any of this up. There was no learned statement of where he thinks the world is in getting to the point where CO 2 starts to reduce. There was praise for China’s renewables with no mention that they account for more than 3o times the amount of CO2 put out by the UK or that we assist them to do this by buying so many imports from them. There was  no analysis of why there had been plenty of climate change in the world before mankind arrived, and more again before mankind invented petrol cars and gas boilers.

He did tell us the IEA thinks the world will get to peak fossil fuel usage by the end of this decade. No great sense of urgency there then for most countries but no complaint from Mr Lammy about the big CO 2 producers who are increasing their output of what he sees as a devilish gas.

China, India and Russia are leading the way to more CO 2 this decade. Some think fossil fuel use will still rise after 2030 as emerging market countries continue to develop , drawing on more coal, gas and oil.

He had grand words for the need for the advanced world to do much more to help the emerging world go direct to renewables and electricity, missing out oil and gas based growth. Yet he also reminded us how many in low income countries still have no access to any electricity, and pointed out how much more grid will be needed before the renewables can be connected.

He recalled the promise oft repeated that the advanced countries would make at least $100 bn a year available to emerging economies for green matters. He was unable to tell us when and how that would happen.  Turning to the UK all he could pledge was a £900 m guarantee for the Asia Development Bank. He indicated support for the idea of increasing the capital of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development but did not mention any  Treasury approval to ship them some cash.

So David Lammy, who are you kidding? It is very unlikely the UK herself will be producing all carbon free electricity by 2030. It is a racing certainty the world’s use of fossil fuels and carbon output will continue to climb while he is foreign Secretary. His speech was empty of detail and free of any further UK financial commitment. I agree with him in not offering more cash.I would be happier if he made world peace and prosperity his mission rather than net zero, and took seriously the issues of Ukraine, Gaza and the growing restrictions on trade from tariffs, bans and windfall taxes.How much longer can senior members of the government deny the reality that they are not going to hit U.K. targets for net zero and that most of the rest of the world has no intention of closing down all its fossil fuel based activities. There is still no U.K. government estimate of the costs of all this.

If the Chancellor wanted to pay pensioners their winter fuel allowance she could do so. If she wanted to avoid the threatened tax attacks on enterprise, investment, home ownership and pension savings she could do so. The crocodile tears from the government that they do not want to do these things but have to owing to the budget situation are false.

If the Chancellor is bright and understands the OBR and Bank as she should she can see as I can see how you could make different choices, avoiding the unpleasant spending cuts and damaging tax rises. Finding £20 bn would easily fix it. So here are some of the ways she seems to be turning down.

1. Ring the Bank of England and tell them to stop selling bonds at huge losses and sending the bill to taxpayers. No other Central Bank is doing this and the Bank of England says it is not crucial to its monetary policy.

2. The main austerity check is the need to get public debt falling as a percentage of GDP by year 5.For some unknown reason they use public sector debt excluding the Bank of England. If they used the wider definition including the Bank of England, debt would be reduced by the huge cash payments the Treasury is currently making to the Bank, as that cash reappears as an asset at the Bank.

 

3. Recapture the £20 bn of public sector productivity lost since 2020. just stop external recruitment of admin, civil service and back up staff and run the numbers down by natural wastage.

 

4. Implement the excellent Labour slogan that if people can work they should work. Provide the support, training and incentives to get more people out of long term worklessness.

Taking the fuel payment away is a calculated  political decision. Letting a wide range of threats to tge self employed, to strivers, to savers and go investors worry people for 2 months before a budget is also a political choice. It is driving people abroad, leading people to sell assets, get out of being landlords and selling U.K. shares before the attacks materialise. The danger for the Chancellor is it may prove easier to undermine confidence and depress people than to pick them up again after a nasty budget.

Why did a MP earning a good six figure salary with an intelligent and capable wife need a rich man to buy clothes for them both?  Why when he accepts free clothes for his wife did he not automatically register the gift? He would of course have known of his wife’s good fortune.

Any MP knows that gifts and grants worth thousands of pounds all need to be registered promptly. It is not as if he forgot, as he registered his own gift of clothes. He decided a gift to his wife did not need the same prompt treatment, then his office decided rightly they did need to register this.

This is a bigger issue because we were promised greater transparency and honesty from the new government. Labour in Opposition were eternally vigilant for the slightest error or questionable judgement by Conservative Ministers and MPs . We were promised a new puritan era of government staying well within the tight rules. I remember being challenged because I had not declared an article I had written for the FT. They were so disappointed when I explained that I refused payment so there was nothing to declare.

The U.K. does not give the PM’s  wife a national role as First Lady with official engagements and an admin office to organise events. We have  a royal family to do that. Only occasionally does a PM’s wife accompany her husband when he has a work engagement. She is not the focus of attention and it would be a distraction if a PM ‘s wife wanted to make her fashion sense the talk of the journalists rather than the event they were attending. A PM ‘s wife can dress well from any store or mail order retailer at affordable prices and can wear suitable garments on more than one occasion. There is no need to rely on a donor for a fancy wardrobe. Mrs Starmer has her own senior role in the NHS paying her a salary.

This is one of those gifts that comes with a big political price.It jars with many voters when it is the background to taking away £300 of heating help for pensioners. Well paid Labour MPs charging taxpayers for energy bills on their second homes also sits uneasily with the present news.

It is difficult to comprehend the stupidity of this government. Dear energy and inflation helped bring down the last government. The Labour opposition hammered them for the rising prices, the impact on people’s budgets. They supported energy subsidies and wanted them to be bigger. Now they are in office they have presided over a 10% increase in managed fuel bill prices and taken away a crucial winter fuel grant from many low income pensioners. Their whole energy policy is based on pricing fossil fuel out of use.

They have put Miliband in charge of energy policy. He has set about destroying the U.K. oil, gas and residual coal industry. He is taking measures which will leave the U.K. more dependent on imports, more vulnerable to power cuts and facing the reality that more renewables with the  necessary fossil fuel back up will be dearer, not cheaper. He no longer promises the £300 off bills as more renewables come in that was offered in the election.

Labour has taken on the de industrialisation policies of the last government. It has dumped the softening of the policies when the past government re opened exploration and development licences for our own gas and oil. The last government was in favour of getting out our own metallurgical coal.It did heavily subsidise residential energy bills. It never considered taking fuel payments away from pensioners.

The public wanted change. I wanted a policy more directed to energy security and to affordable energy. Instead the new government has decided to be greener and nastier than the government they displaced, Taking away pensioner fuel payments after a big hike in rigged energy prices and against a background of overtaxed dear energy is a bad error. It antagonises many Labour voters and is opposed by energy and industrial Unions.

Woven into Labour’s broad message of change in the election was the roll out of a superior industrial strategy.We were told Labour would not accept the loss of jobs in steel despite large state subsidies, and would want a manufacturing revival.

Instead Labour has signed off the death of steel making in blast furnaces at Port Talbot and looks likely to do the same at Scunthorpe. Instead of it dismantling the penal taxes and carbon charges the EU and the last government imposed they are intensifying those. Like the last government they will pay large sums to subsidise some more steel recycling in the U.K. after a hiatus when we import all the lost steel from the closures. We are told we need to wait until next spring for a steel plan, carefully delayed until our present  steel making industry has been closed down.

We also wait for the general Industrial Strategy. Any worthwhile one has to start by addressing the huge extra costs U.K. industry has to pay for electricity and gas compared to the Chinese and US competitors. Much of this extra cost is the direct result of extra taxes, carbon prices and regulations, and the high cost of trying to replace much of our generating capacity with renewables.

The government should work hard to try to avoid a closure of the Grangemouth refinery. The U.K. does need to be able to produce its own petrol, diesel and other fractions of oil instead of turning all that productive activity over to imports.

We were promised in Labour’s  Manifesto a new era of transparency. The Labour leader came over as a virtuous puritan, out to clean the stables and run an austerity policy. Modest additions to spending would be precisely costed and specifically funded by a small tax rise here or a small spending cut there. It was not exciting or uplifting, but some people liked it whilst many others wanted to show their disapproval of the then government.

So what went wrong? Why are MPs and journalists told that they should not expect to know what is in the alleged £22 bn black hole we hear about continuously? Maybe one day the Treasury will allow us to peep, but not before the budget. We hear large uncosted and unfunded spending commitments being made as the government offers inflation busting pay awards to various public sector groups well above the pay inflation allowed for in the budget figures. Why is there no formal Treasury statement of cost and explanation of how it will paid for? Why is there no Office of Budget Responsibility forecast and commentary as promised? The government is busy breaking the new law it is bringing in to make an OBR assessment essential for such events.

Why have various senior civil servants turned up as senior advisers or. Ministers? What does that tell us about civil service impartiality? Why have donors turned up in jobs or with favoured passes and access?

Why are they agreeing to close down our primary steel making capacity before completing and publishing their steel strategy? What is the point of a strategy if you have no industry left?  How are they allowing in the budgets for future revenues for the accelerated decline of the oil and gas industry? This is  the industry  which pays several times as much tax per pound of profit as anything else?

All the government says about anything is that it is all a mess thanks to the previous government. It also complains about all of us, alleging there is a societal black hole. Government is about tackling the problems before you. Normal governments explain the issues and then set about supplying the remedies. When they announce increased spending they cost it, get it approved and explain how it is being paid for. Most leaders try to point the country to a better tomorrow  and take pride in what is working and is good. How much longer can this government keep up the bad mouthing of the country, the NHS, political groups they do not like, and the state of society?

 

I have long been asking why GDP per head is twice the EU level in the US. Those who want the U.K. to obey more EU laws and pay the EU more money never want to answer this or think it some fabricated Brexiteer question . Now Mr Draghi has written a long report saying that the EU this century has fallen badly behind. Its productivity is poor, its investment too small, its skew to making cars rather than digital products and services is impeding growth in real incomes and living standards.

Central to Mr Draghi’s case ( as mine) is the EU – just like the U.K. in and out of the EU – has gone for dear energy whilst the US and China have gone for cheaper. He says EU electricity costs 2-3 times US and gas is a knock out 4-5 times US. China goes for cheap coal. He sets out the large extra costs of the EU’s net zero policies which he supports.

So what are his remedies? He says the EU must impose more tariffs and the carbon border adjustment tax on imports to offset the advantage. That means higher prices for consumers. He says the EU must find 5% more of its GDP to invest every year. He says the EU must borrow more itself to pump prime the hundreds of billions of investment needed.

Germany and some other states are against the EU building up yet bigger debts. The U.K. by Brexit has avoided responsibility for its share of the Euro 800 bn they are already borrowing, dodging a Euro 120 bn bullet. The U.K. would be well advised to study Draghi’s analysis of EU poor performance and move our policy on energy closer to the US one, as more affordable energy is crucial to industrial success.

I went to Jon’s launch yesterday in London. His book makes a strong case for lower taxes, fewer areas run by government and less regulation. He condemned the attacks on free speech and increasingly intrusive rules and bans on motorists.

He started his talk by pointing out there are now 8 bn people alive. Over all the years of human history there have been 109 bn in total, now dead. Multi billion populations are very recent. The average age of death was 30 for all those dead, lowered in part by a much higher level of infant and child mortality. he argued 80 bn of those died of disease.The reason life expectancy has shot up so much is the huge advances in medical science with vaccines and antibiotics given us a much longer life. More people now die in older age of inflammatory conditions. Maybe medical science will make more breakthroughs there.

It is free enterprise that has taken scientific and technical advances and applied them to products that prolong our lives. It is that same combination that has given us the car, the plane, the digital Revolution, the food conservation and supply revolution.

The book shows how high living standards and faster growth go along with lower tax rates, controlled public spending and regulation limited to the most important. It is well worth a read. I do not agree with all its challenges to the much loved principle of free healthcare at the point of need or to some of welfare measures the U.K. has developed.

Prime Ministers usually praise most of the things going on in the country they govern. They make proposals for improvement. They tell us things will be better tomorrow as we follow their lead.

Not this one. He tells us everything about the country and the government is bad. The NHS is broken. There is a societal black hole, meaning the people misbehave. The Treasury does not have enough money. There were “right wing “ riots on the streets. He stresses it is all the fault of the last Conservative government.

It is true many former Conservative voters stayed at home or voted Reform because they were very critical of the last government. They did not go and vote Labour because they thought Labour would make things worse. They are angry about the way the Starmer government runs down the U.K. as well as about the last not very conservative  government. They are angry that his changes in his own words will make things worse. They are angry about fuel benefit  cuts, about bloated public sector pay awards for well paid train drivers, about more overseas aid, more so called green investment, the continuing failure to control migration , more poor performance of public services and nationalised industries.

The PM may find it is easy to drive down the low polls for his party and himself but more difficult to pull them up again when has punished us enough. Normal PM s do not behave like this as they realise the public doesn’t like gloom and does expect a government who identifies actual or made up holes to fill them in quickly. Labour won a record majority on a very low share of the vote. It was no endorsement of Labour but a scream of anger by Conservative voters that their party had let them down badly over stopping the boats, controlling migration, keeping tax down and avoiding inflation.

The latest polls show Labour down to 30%. They show Reform and the  Conservatives together well ahead,  but also the big split between the two would still leave both individually trailing Labour. Since the election both Opposition parties are up, Reform by the more. Conservatives still lead Reform.

 

Are you as fed up as I am with left wing parties and many in the media constantly running down our past? They demand apologies for historical bad conduct only from Britain. They rightly  condemn slavery but do not insist on statute removal of Roman artefacts, a society based on violent conquest, slavery and an army of occupation. They ignore the U.K. role in ending the slave trade.  So here to provide balance and perspective are 10 things to be proud of in U.K. history.

1. Great Britain has pioneered many crucial technological advances that have raised world living standards. There was the steam engine, factory organisation, the jet engine, vaccines and many great products from the Industrial revolution  to the worldwide web.

2. The U.K. pioneered universal suffrage and democratic government through the Glorious Revolution to the great Reform Bill and votes for women.

3. The U.K. stood alone against Germany’s attempt to govern Europe with an army of conquest, later joining with the USA and USSR to end the tyranny and genocide.

4. The U.K. has made a huge cultural contribution to the world. Shakespeare is the world’s greatest dramatist. His plays are acted and filmed worldwide today because they capture eternal truths about mankind.

5. The U.K. pioneered relief of poverty from the provision of money under the early Poor laws by parishes through to the post 1945 comprehensive pension and benefits system.

6. The U.K.   has stood up for the self determination of peoples  and rescued smaller countries from invasion and aggression by violent neighbours. The U.K. sided with the Netherlands against Spanish occupation, defeated Napoleon’s efforts to invade  many European countries and helped liberate Kuwait.

7. The U.K. has been a leading force for free trade worldwide.

8. The U.K. invented or developed football, cricket, rugby and lawn tennis as global sports, bringing much entertainment to a world in need of joy.

9. The U.K. developed modern farming techniques from selective breeding to higher yielding crops to help eliminate starvation. .The U.K. has a big Aid programme helping bring improved agriculture to hungry countries.

10. Great Britain founded the east coast settlements in North America that fathered the USA, the most powerful and innovative nation on earth. The drivers of US independence based their thoughts and actions on Great Britain’s political theories and structures.