Yesterday evening I was asked to join a discussion about net zero policies on LBC. The person putting the net zero view wished to mount a personal  attack on me on false grounds rather than dealing with the realities of the damaging policies he and Mayor Kahn are proposing to Mr Burnham. He seemed surprised by my line of argument and unable to cope with it.

In the short time I was given I tried  to summarise my long advanced case that the main UK net zero policies are self harming  and self defeating. I pointed out that most of them lead to more world CO 2, most notably the crazy decision to keep our gas in the ground, replacing it with imported LNG. This generates three to four tines as much CO 2 as using our own piped gas. This came as a shock to my LBC counterpart who then tried to deny the obvious.

I did not have time to point out if I bought a battery car large quantities of CO 2 would be generated abroad in its manufacture to  mine the battery materials and make the battery. More importantly when I plugged it in to recharge most  likely  they would need to burn more gas in a gas power station to meet my extra demand. How does that help? It would be more efficient to burn the fossil fuel directly in the vehicle.

I did point out in the ten years from the Paris climate Treaty there has been a big increase in world CO 2 led by China, India, USA, Russia and Brazil. There is no sign of that trend changing. The UK inflicting self harm  and choosing a self defeating policy makes things worse all round. Why won’t they listen? How many more times do we need to explain the obvious?

The government is letting the train operating companies take the hit for delays  and cancellations which were rife on the network over the last two days.  They have to handle the passengers, try to find alternatives for them, and pay them compensation.

This was yet another case when the blame rests elsewhere. Their  trains were working, their crews had turned up. The trains were held up by all signal lights going to red owing to signal failure. Signals and the power for them are firmly under the control of long nationalised Network Rail.

Network Rail can say  the  immediate cause was a ninety second power cut by the electricity supplier. They are meant to be able to handle that with stand by emergency power. That apparently failed.

I heard a nationalised rail apologist on the radio blame inadequate funding and staffing of Network Rail for the chaos. Network Rail was set up under a previous Labour government and has  enjoyed two years of more generous Labour settlements  under this government. Surely something as crucial as back up power for signals,  central to safe running, should have been an affordable priority?

The nationalised railway needs to get more  used to power cuts.With more  renewables on the grid there will be more supply interruptions. Spain was a warning where general power cuts closed down the trains and took out the traffic lights, causing road chaos as well. Travellers do not want to spend hours in a stopped train, which could be even worse in a tunnel.If nationalisation is so wonderful why can’t it run a signalling system to keep the trains running?

Water covers 71% of the planet. The UK gets plenty of rain most of the time, and has still been getting plenty of rain in the North whilst the south is dry. We had a wet winter and watched as the authorities allowed billions of gallons to rush to the seas without storing enough of it in case the summer was as dry as 1976 or 1995.

Worse still the population of the UK has grown by 4  million over the last ten years, mainly migrants needing homes and a water supply. The highly regulated monopoly regional companies  did not put in new reservoirs to meet this extra demand. The Regulator    did not want the extra  cost on bills. In my area the necessary plan to  build a large new reservoir at Abingdon  to handle all the additional demand and new homes was foolishly delayed.

The Havant new reservoir was underway when Labour took over. The government is now taking a leisurely look at another nine projects. Abingdon is back on the list, with an application expected later this year. It is thought it will be well into 2028 before permission is granted to start work.Some think it might complete around 2040.

There needs to be a much greater sense of urgency. Labour promised to speed up the building of infrastructure. More reservoirs, bigger pipes and additional dirty water treatment works are much needed.Why the delay? Why lecture people on using less water when there is so much of it, and you do not destroy it by using it? Why think this  is about the climate when it is mainly about population growth and about an inadequate and ageing infrastructure that needs modernising.

Rachel Reeves was given a lot of extra freedom by officials and the OBR with their new fiscal rules. They built into the new model the ability to offset assets created or acquired by the borrowing, arguing markets would appreciate state capitalism in action. Why not credit government with future revenues from investments made?

The problem is the quality and risk of the investments. Two of the government’s bigger ones, British Steel and the Post Office are absorbing about £500 m a year each instead of generating dividends for taxpayers.The investments in renewable energy require guaranteed prices and subsidies which the government wants to partly shift from bill payers to the Treasury as costs. Carbon capture and storage “ investments” just mean dearer energy.

The government as it desperately seeks new investments  through the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy is likely to get shares  in the more risky projects the private sector is nervous about. Government will become a shareholder as bail out financier of last resort if the project  goes wrong.

Its money spent on rail will be subsidy, not an investment bringing profits and dividends. HS 2 is the biggest so called investment they blunder on with. There is no likelihood of profits or dividends with no trains running before 2040!

Building 1.5 m homes this Parliament as promised looks impossible. They now need to build 350,000 a year when they are only doing about half that.Council homes cost too much to build for the government to make a big dent in the target by building more of them.

The decision to spend to invest can only work if government reverses the habit of a lifetime and backs winners that can turn a profit. There is no sign of this happening. Borrowing more  on this  pretext will not bring growth or confidence to a flat lining economy suffering from dear energy and high taxes.

There are no surprises in the way the UK stock exchange is shrinking. The UK government is to blame. Its net zero bans, its high energy taxes, its rush to nationalisation, its lack of enthusiasm for private capital  and competition, its excessive regulations  and its wish to align  with an EU that is also anti private capital,anti cheap energy and the digital revolution all point to money and deals rushing to the USA away from the UK and EU.

Two of the remaining large quoted UK companies,  BP and Astra Zeneca, are in the news  highlighting the negative impacts of UK policy on them. BP is going to sell out of its North Sea assets as they are hit by high taxes and bans. Astra Zeneca wants to merge with a large US company to dilute its UK interests and make it more of a US major. EU style controls on medical work and the limited list controlled prices model of NHS buying cause tensions with business. These two companies are in the top seven of listings by market value accounting for 14% of the Ftse 100. Were they to cancel their London listings it would be a major blow.

There are many UK companies selling up altogether as shareholders show frustration with UK valuations and taxes. Segro has been a very successful industrial property company. It is accepting a US bid well above the UK market valuation.

As the UK government plunges on with its wish to close down all our oil, gas, high energy using businesses, and cut back our food growing, so we become ever more dependent on imports. To pay for the imports we need to raise foreign currencies. Selling our best businesses to foreigners is the foolish short term way of paying for the imports.

We need to reverse the atrophy of the London Stock Exchange. That needs new UK fund raisings with a government backing free enterprise and private capital. It means reversing bans and penal taxes. I will set out how in future blogs.

The Draghi Report highlighted the way the EU economy is falling badly behind the US this century. Sky high energy taxes and prices, and  an anti high tec company set of law codes and taxes have  kept the EU in the slow lane.  US GDP per head is growing faster and is now 80% higher than the EU. The UK has been dragged down by EU laws and taxes, and has  only grown a little faster than the EU since Brexit owing to its failure to change suffocating EU rules and charges.It has managed to avoid some of the latest unhelpful laws of the EU but is stupidly putting itself into the carbon taxes, emissions trading and carbon based tariff schemes which help make energy so dear.

A study by the European Centre for international  political economy in 2023 set out how US GDP per head 47 % higher than  EU in 2010 surged to 82% higher by 2023 based on cheaper energy and better technology.It showed how the major  economies of Germany, France, Italy and Spain were falling further down the league  table compared to US states. It is getting worse as the US accelerates its highly successful data centre and A I investments. The EU is becoming a digital colony of the US whilst protesting and seeking to constrain and tax the US companies it relies on for so many purposes.

The story of this century shows UK voters were right to vote to leave  the damaging EU which has been holding down growth and living standards. This government’s  wish to bind us closer to a failing economic model is bad economics and worse politics. We need much cheaper energy and we need to liberate our  tec sector.No to cbam, no to EU emissions trading, no to EU net zero madness, no to  the digital tax, no to more tariffs on non EU imports, no to energy dependence on EU imports, no to the big fish give away to the EU.

Councils and Mayors are suggesting what they would like to for their communities. They are soon discovering Mr Burnham has no intention of giving them powers to do popular things in their own areas.

Some want the right to say No to housing and accommodation being made available preferentially to illegal arrivals in the UK. They think the Home Office is putting far too many young males into adapted barracks or social housing relative to the size of the local community and the facilities available. Government intends to override local wishes.

Some areas want to slow the rate of new development because of the strains it is placing on local roads, public services and utilities. Government intends to drive through more housing regardless of local wishes and the realities of service provision.

Some Mayors rightly see that if they are given more grant from Whitehall the priority is to get local tax bills down to ease the squeeze from Council tax increases on family budgets. Ms Haigh dismissively says Mayors cannot become mini Chancellors and are not to give tax cuts.

So on the big three issues, the cost of living and tax squeeze, the pace of inward migration, and plans for each local community the government says a big No to devolution. Indeed it plans to  centralise more, driving up taxes to spend more, putting more illegal arrivals in unsuitable locations and overriding plans for community development. It is one big con.