Sizewell C won't save Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband has suddenly realised that you cannot run an electricity grid on intermittent renewables alone. The Energy Secretary's announcement this morning of £14.2 billion worth of funding for a new plant at Sizewell C, together with cash for Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and continued research into the holy grail of nuclear fusion, is an admission that energy policy so far has been far too concentrated on wind and solar.
But nothing that Miliband has unveiled does anything to help the energy and climate secretary achieve his ambition to decarbonise the electricity supply by 2030 – or ease the coming crunch as he tries to reach that target. It has already been 15 years since the government approved plans for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley C – which developers EDF promised would be ready to cook our Christmas turkeys by 2017.
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Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
QUENTIN LETTS: Ed was in his element - but would you even trust him with a milk float?
Ed Miliband was in his element, spending our money. Energy Secretary Miliband had come to the Commons to announce a £14.2billion binge on nuclear energy. How skittish and giddy he was. The Red Rum teeth were brandished. All his goofiest limb-waving gesticulations were seen. He was full of beans, his pleasure possibly accentuated by the fact that the Cabinet minister rumoured to have come a cropper in the spending review is Yvette Cooper, wife of his former shadow chancellor Ed Balls. Miliband and Balls once competed for Gordon Brown's favours. Later they had a fruitless spell running the opposition. That partnership ended badly. Now Mr Miliband is back in footlights. 'I don't want to steal the Chancellor of the Exchequer's thunder,' he insisted. Don't believe it. He was relishing this opportunity to announce so much spending. It is a measure of Rachel Reeves 's decline that Mr Miliband, not she, was entrusted with this splurge. He kept nibbling his right thumb, a gerbil with its carrot. Now he grabbed his right foot, clutched his right cheek, hugged himself, flicked through his file, shrugged, muttered to himself, stroked his eyelashes, ran a finger through his fringe, patted the back of his head, excavated wax from one ear, pulled weird faces, drilled his cross-eyed stare at the carpet, clenched one fist and said 'incredibly' a lot. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: Would you entrust this man with £14.2billion? Would you hire him even to drive a milk float? Shadow minister Nick Timothy said the Conservatives had long been pro-nuclear. 'It's kinda hard on a day like this to be a member of the Opposition,' laughed Mr Miliband before he asserted his core philosophy: public spending. 'I'm the guy that identified Sizewell and I'm the guy that's delivering Sizewell,' he crowed. 'They didn't put the money up!' In Mili-land, 'putting the money up' is an entirely asexual, amoebic activity. How that money is created (ie taxes or borrowing) is never mentioned. The Lib Dems' spokesman, Pippa Heylings, blew up on take-off. She tried complaining that the Tories were responsible for 14 years of 'dither and delay' on nuclear. It was not lost on the House that David Cameron's Coalition government froze nuclear projects on the insistence of... the loony Lib Dems! Newcomer Heylings was whacked by heckles and laughter. This offended her tender sensibilities. 'Can I continue? Can I continue?' she squawked. Speaker Hoyle told her to stop being feeble. It was, incidentally, the Speaker's birthday. He was wished happy returns by not just one or two MPs but by 49 of them. Repetitive sycophancy syndrome. Mr Miliband, in response to hapless Heylings, gave us a glimpse of his boyhood. He noted that Ms Heylings had 'slightly airbrushed out the role of the current leader of the Lib Dems' (Sir Ed Davey was, you may recall, an energy secretary in the Coalition years). 'We'll sort of Trotsky that out, to use a family term,' honked Mr Miliband. In the Miliband home of the 1970s, Trotsky's merciless treatment of his enemies was plainly an everyday topic. Numerous Labour MPs had fled the chamber at the start of the statement but those who stayed were enthusiastic about the spending, none more so than Derby South's Baggy Shanker. He whooped about Rolls-Royce winning a big commission to help build the new nuclear plant. 'Great news for the country, great news for Derby,' cried Mr Shanker. And pretty decent news for the Shanker finances, too. His register of interests shows that Mr Baggy Trousers owns more than £70,000 worth of Rolls-Royce shares, his wife and son having more. How commendably Thatcherite. Until recently the Left would have fretted about radioactive waste from nuclear energy. In the Blair years that was the establishment's position. Now it was only Jeremy Corbyn (Ind, Islington N) who mentioned it. Political fashion has changed. The Left has been mugged by reality. But we are all paying the cost, in billions, for its past posturing.
The Sun
6 hours ago
- The Sun
Ed Miliband accused of ‘rewriting history' after claiming winter fuel axe was to stop millionaires cashing in
ED Miliband was accused of 'rewriting history' yesterday after he claimed scrapping winter fuel was about stopping millionaires getting payments. The bungling Net Zero Secretary tried to justify Labour's original decision to strip the handout by suggesting the pensioners who would've missed out were all rich. 2 2 But some of them earned as little as £12,000 per year. Mr Miliband said: 'The principal question was, the richest in our society, should they get the winter fuel payment, should millionaires, should the richest get the winter fuel payment? 'I think the answer for most people to that is no.' The Net Zero Secretary's desperate bid to explain scrapping winter fuel payments – before the decision was partially reversed – was blasted by senior Tories, who accused him of spouting a 'pack of lies'. Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie told The Sun: 'Red Ed is even more out of touch than we thought if he thinks people will believe this pack of lies. 'The economy is worse off than when they found it - taxes higher, unemployment higher and living standards lower. 'He is just trying to rewrite history to try and cover up Labour's embarrassing U-turn.' Meanwhile, a flagship Net Zero plan has been spared ahead of next week's spending review — to opponents' dismay. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has ensured his £13billion warm homes scheme will not be downgraded after negotiations with the Treasury. Chancellor Rachel Reeves decided not to cut the cash which allows heating upgrades through better insulation, solar panels and heat pumps.
Sky News
7 hours ago
- Sky News
The spending review is a massive deal for Rachel Reeves, Labour, and the country - here's what to expect
This spending review is a massive deal. It's a massive deal because of the sums of money and capital the government is about to allocate - £600bn over the next three to four years. But it is also a massive political moment as the Labour government tries to turn the corner on a difficult first year and show voters it can deliver the change it promised. It is not, say No 10 insiders, another reset, but rather a chance to show 'working people' why they voted Labour. Look at the blitz of announcements over recent days, and this is a government trying to sell the story of renewal. On Tuesday, the prime minister and his energy secretary, Ed Miliband, announced the biggest nuclear building programme for half a century, with £14.2bn being poured into Sizewell C on the Suffolk coastline to create over 10,000 jobs over the next decade and provide energy security. Last week, the chancellor announced £15bn for new rail, tram and bus networks across the West Midlands and the North. She's also expected to green-light a new rail line between Liverpool and Manchester on Wednesday, and invest capital in housebuilding. In total, there will be £113bn of additional capital investment, which the government will frame as the long-promised 'decade of renewal' around the three pillars of security, health and the economy. 3:30 But that is only one half of this spending review and only one half of the story we will hear on Wednesday, because the largesse of the capital investment - which the chancellor will say is only possible because of the choices she made in the first year of government - will be matched with spending settlements for day-to-day spending across Whitehall that will draw into sharp relieve the choices and priorities for this government. Security and health are two of her pillars, and it will be defence and health that will take a bigger share of the spending pot. Frustration in the Home Office Having front-loaded day-to-day spending into the first and second years of this Labour administration, the overall pot will rise by 1.2 per cent in real terms every year for the rest of the parliament. That is pretty modest growth and, bluntly, it means that if the defence and NHS budgets get a bigger share of the pot, there will be real terms cuts in some unprotected departments. One to watch is the Home Office, where the home secretary was the last to hold out on a settlement and seems to have had it imposed on her by the chancellor. Hers is a huge brief, spanning police - including the manifesto pledge to increase police on the beat by 13,000 - border security, immigration, and homeland security. There is frustration in the Home Office that while 'security' is one of the government's pillars, it is the Ministry of Defence that has been given the funding. If Yvette Cooper is to deliver on police numbers, what else might have to give? Watch too for a squeeze on council budgets as the chancellor uses her capital budget to invest in house building, while day-to-day spending is squeezed across our councils, schools and courts. 7:58 Reeves under pressure to boost spending This is the rub. Rachel Reeves will insist on Wednesday that spending is rising by £190bn more over the course of the parliament, partly because of those tough tax rises in her first budget. But largesse in capital investment won't be able to disguise the short-term pressures on day-to-day spending from a Labour Party and a set of voters fed up with cuts and feeling like their lives aren't improving. The winter fuel reversal is the proof point. The chancellor, who will not loosen her fiscal rule of funding day-to-day spending through tax receipts, has to find £1.25bn to pay the allowance to nine million pensioners this winter. She is also under pressure to lift the two-child benefits cap, with Liz Kendall, Bridget Phillipson and Sir Keir Starmer all thought to want this to happen. That will cost up to £3bn. There is pressure to change the disability cuts in order to get the welfare changes through parliament. The point is that the chancellor is under huge pressure to lift spending, not keep her foot on its throat, and that means into the autumn, the clamour for targeted tax rises will only grow. Can Reeves sell this government's 'renewal' story? But amongst the top team, there is some guarded optimism. The political pain of the winter fuel allowance U-turn has eased the pressure on the doorstep: one very senior Labour politician told me this week that last weekend was the first time in a long time that the matter didn't come up on the doorstep and "the first time in a long while that it felt alright." On Wednesday, there will be pain. The headlines will scream cuts and open up talk about tax rises that will run right up to the budget in October. But it will also be a moment where this Labour government can show voters in the form of dozens of projects and thousands of jobs, that it does have a plan to rebuild. It is a spending review that will define Labour in power for the rest of this parliament and how our country looks and feels for years to come. The political aim is to do enough - be it on hospital waiting lists, energy bills, wages, or shovels in the ground - to persuade voters at the next election to give Labour another chance. For months, MPs have been quietly grumbling that this Labour government is in power without a story to tell. On Wednesday, we'll see how well Ms Reeves can write, and sell, the next chapter.
