Latest news with #EdMiliband
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Miliband pushing to recognise Palestinian state
Ed Miliband is among a growing number of Cabinet ministers pushing to recognise a Palestinian state. The Energy Secretary has joined the ranks with several MPs who are placing pressure on Sir Keir Starmer to take the step as soon as possible. The Prime Minister will today convene an urgent Cabinet meeting on Gaza and later this week unveil his plan for formally recognising Palestinian statehood. Sir Keir's move to officially recognise the country comes after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said he would do so in September. Behind the scenes, Cabinet ministers including Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister; Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary; and Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, are putting pressure on Sir Keir to take the step. Mr Miliband is also supportive of the move, and voted in favour of Palestinian statehood when he was the leader of Labour in 2014. An emergency meeting A third of Sir Keir's Cabinets want the UK to take swift action to recognise Palestine as a state, according to The Times. Pressure from the Cabinet comes ahead of the Prime Minister unveiling his most detailed plan to date for formally recognising Palestine as a state later this week. But it is expected that the recognition of statehood will still be conditional on the delivery of a ceasefire and potentially the release of remaining Israeli hostages by Hamas. Ministers will meet for a rare emergency Cabinet meeting on Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of summer parliamentary recess, to discuss the situation in Gaza. Mr Miliband voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a state alongside Israel in a Commons vote in 2014, while he was Labour leader, as did Ms Nandy. Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, also voted for the motion over a decade ago. On Friday, 135 Labour MPs signed a letter calling for the 'immediate recognition' of Palestinian statehood, while Labour mayors and the party's Scottish leadership are also piling on the pressure.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Tilting at windmills? Trump's claims about turbines fact-checked
The wind turbines visible from Donald Trump's Turnberry and Menie golf courses have long enraged the president. At a press conference at his Ayrshire resort announcing a trade deal with the EU this weekend, Trump launched into an unprompted tirade against windfarms, instructing European countries to get rid of theirs. He was visiting Turnberry for the first time since the nearby onshore Kirk Hill windfarm began producing energy from eight turbines. But were his comments about wind power correct? Trump claimed: 'It is the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy, but windmills should not be allowed.' This is certainly not true for onshore wind, which is cheap to build and generates electricity very inexpensively. Offshore windfarms cost more to build but when it is windy produces electricity extremely cheaply. There are costs associated with wind; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has recently faced criticism for setting the maximum price at his upcoming renewable energy auction at £113 a megawatt-hour for offshore wind, for record-length contracts of 20 years. By comparison, the wholesale gas price is £78/MWh at present. However, during the price spike of 2022, wholesale gas went above £170/MWh. Because Britain's electricity grid has not been sufficiently updated, windfarms are also often paid millions to switch off when it is very windy to avoid overloading the network. However, even with these added costs, offshore wind is less expensive than nuclear to build, has a stable price compared with gas, which is sold on international markets, and is cheaper to generate than fossil fuels. Trump has often claimed that offshore wind kills whales and drives them crazy. It is tricky to make definitive claims about whether or not whales are driven 'loco' by offshore wind, as many aspects of whale behaviour are not well understood by scientists. However, it does not appear there is direct evidence that offshore windfarms frequently cause whale deaths. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said: 'There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.' Whales could be disturbed during the initial stages of offshore-wind construction. High-resolution geophysical surveys to map the seafloor are carried out that could disturb marine mammals. However, these are much smaller in scale than those conducted for oil and gas exploration. Most of the known direct causes of whale deaths are related to the fishing industry, with the mammal caught in or ingest fishing equipment. The warming and acidification of oceans caused by global heating from burning fossil fuels is also a threat to whales' survival. Trump said windfarms 'kill the birds', and this is true, to an extent. Birds can collide with the turbines, and offshore windfarms are sometimes constructed in important feeding sites for seabirds such as puffins as they are put in shallow waters where sandeels are found. However, the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the amount killed, for example, by domestic cats and from flying into power lines. Destroying bird habitat and poisoning their food with pesticides has also had a greater impact on populations than the prevalence of wind turbines. Some wind companies are taking action to become less lethal to birds; a project in Norway painted its turbines black, which resulted in 70% fewer bird deaths. Trump claimed: 'When they start to rust and rot in eight years you can't really turn them off, you can't burn them. They won't let you bury the propellers, the props, because there's a certain type of fibre that doesn't go well with the land.' This is not true. Wind turbines have a typical lifespan of 20-25 years, and the industry is getting better at recycling old parts; according to the National Grid, 96% of a wind turbine is made from recyclable materials. Their outer shell, shafts, gearing and electrical components are typically made from steel, copper, aluminium, other precious metals and recyclable plastics. The blades are made from fibreglass, which is not biodegradable and is indeed typically sent to landfill. However, scientists have found a way to repurpose them into cement, and the blades have been used to create pedestrian footbridges in Ireland and noise barriers for highways in the US. He's right on this one; China accounts for about 60% of global wind turbine manufacturing. However, the country dominates the rest of the globe on most manufacturing, so this isn't a surprise. The UK wind manufacturing sector is growing as part of the green economy, providing jobs in post-industrial areas in particular. Trump claimed wind turbines were killing people. There have been a handful of human deaths linked to turbines, but these are construction accidents. Deaths are not uncommon in many big industries, including oil and gas , but wind turbines do not pose a fatal threat to the general public.
The National
2 days ago
- Business
- The National
Labour's 'nuclear tax' to cost Scots £300m to fund Sizewell C
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has imposed a new levy on energy bills to fund the spiralling costs of the Sizewell C power station in Suffolk. Billpayers will be charged an extra £12 per year to fund the project, which has almost doubled in price to £38 billion. The UK Government has also committed to a loan facility worth £36.6bn, which means the total cost could top £47.7bn. That is more than the final cost of Hinkley Point C, which Greenpeace once dubbed "the most expensive object on Earth". READ MORE: Quarter of Keir Starmer's Cabinet blasted Donald Trump's last UK trip It comes despite Labour's election pledge to cut energy bills, with the energy price cap rising consistently since October. Graham Leadbitter (below, left), the SNP's energy spokesperson, said 'This toxic overspend now totals £48bn and Anas Sarwar has serious questions to answer as to whether he thinks it's acceptable for Scots to foot the bill through higher energy bills – it is an absolute disgrace that energy rich Scotland will see Scots face higher energy bills because of a nuclear plant running over budget in Labour-run England. (Image: Jeff) 'The Labour Party promised they'd cut energy bills by £300 yet they've soared on their watch – now we have the absurd situation where they've chosen to pile money into extortionate nuclear energy and are asking Scots to pick up the tab. 'Independent analysis shows this will cost Scottish households £300m in higher bills through a decade-long 'nuclear tax' all the while Scottish Labour refuse to acknowledge the white elephant in the room that they support these disastrous plans.' Leadbitter said that Scotland 'produces far more electricity that we can hope to use and our future is in renewables' and so had no interest in nuclear power. READ MORE: Trans toilet rules 'may force Scottish museums to close' He added: 'We were told Grangemouth refinery in Scotland couldn't be saved, yet we see a refinery in England protected, a steel works in Scunthorpe bailed out and now a nuclear power plant running twice over budget – it's no wonder Scots are increasingly asking how long we stay tied to this so called 'Union of Equals'?' The UK Government was approached for comment.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Nuclear power is the future Britain rejected. Now it's time for us to think again
Britain was once poised to be the world leader in clean energy. We split the atom, pioneered the first commercial nuclear power station, and by 1988 had built 18 reactors, the third highest number in the world. By the mid-1990s, we were producing enough energy to supply a quarter of the country's electricity. But then, even as climate change was mov ing from being a contested idea to an accepted one, progress stalled. We stopped building entirely. Now we get just 14% of electricity from this source, and five of our six remaining plants are due for retirement at the end of the decade. Last week Ed Miliband optimistically announced the dawn of a new 'golden age' of nuclear power. His hopes rest on a single Suffolk megaplant, Sizewell C – already delayed and now to be around 12 years in the making, if finished on time. And that looks far from guaranteed. After 10 years of planning, and nine of building, Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, pictured above, missed its deadline for completion this year. It has now been pushed back to 2031, with such an expanded budget that it is to be the most costly power plant in history. How did we lose our advantage? Of all the possible ways to gather clean energy, nuclear power seems the most likely to allow us to dispense with fossil fuels completely. Wind and solar power can be unreliable – especially on a cloudy island with such variable weather – and backup systems can't always compensate, as hydroelectricity stores and batteries run down in a few hours. In fact, wind farms must actually shut down when gusts are too strong. Meanwhile, a single nuclear power station creates enough energy to provide power for 2 million average Europeans. Over time, it is also the lowest-price way to garner low-carbon energy, and it has the lightest ecological burden. Steep initial costs are talked about as the central challenge to building more power stations – and that is the block against which political will has tended to founder. Long and risky construction processes mean that the price starts high and can rise astronomically if things go wrong. But British projects are also among the most expensive in the world. Only America does worse. The UK has more stringent safety rules than many other countries – and in some, such as China, construction workers earn less than their British counterparts. High-paying Finland and France build more cheaply, as does South Korea, where costs are roughly a quarter of what they are in Britain. Instead Britain may be missing the secret to success, which – according to the thinktank Britain Remade – is repetition. South Korea builds fleets of plants for every design, relying on economies of scale and learning from practice. This provides workers with standard protocol and a steady pipeline of projects. France bulked up its supply in the 1970s with a similar approach, building 56 reactors with an average construction time of six years each. But Britain seems to have forgotten how to build nuclear power stations. Each project must start again from scratch. That is the direct result of a full 20-year hiatus. Britain's underlying problem with nuclear has not in fact been technical, but psychological. The trigger was two high-profile disasters, both of which sharply halted nuclear progress all around the world: Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. The first was the result of a human mistake – operators disabled safety systems during a test – combined with a flawed reactor design; the second was caused by an earthquake and tsunami. The horrific results were splashed across newspapers, and reporting continued for years. But in some countries the effect has lingered longer than in others. People fear nuclear for much the same reason they worry about shark attacks In the UK, according to a recent study, public fears were further stoked after Chernobyl by an unusual alliance of environmental activists and fossil-fuel interest groups. The Thatcher government was in the midst of a fight with the miners' unions when Chernobyl melted down. The disaster became part of that battle. Analysis shows that MPs sponsored by miners' unions were much more likely to speak out against nuclear energy; newspapers with ties to fossil fuel published more anti-nuclear articles. Britain's sluggishness can also be explained partly by the political makeup of its green groups, which might have formed the vanguard of those pushing for this clean energy solution. But an ideological split emerged, dominated by those who preferred to campaign for reduced energy consumption rather than technological solutions. Environmentalists had turned against nuclear power in the early 1960s – psychologists have tracked its association among these groups with the nuclear bomb. With few green champions for nuclear, Britain turned back to fossil fuels. As a result, there has been an enduring idea in Britain that nuclear is 'very unsafe' – similar to Germany, which has all but shut down its nuclear capacity since Fukushima. This compares with 15% of Danish and 11% of Swedes. But this does not reflect reality. Hugely improved safety methods mean the likelihood of another disaster is extremely minimal. Calculations of deaths per terawatt-hour generated put nuclear power, at 0.03, on a par with wind turbines, which is at 0.04, (mostly from accidents, such as drowning in the process of setting them up). For coal, this rises to 24.6, owing to pollution. In fact living near a coal power station exposes people to more radiation than living near a nuclear one – but both are low, at around 0.01mSv (millisieverts, a measurement of radiation) a year. For comparison, those living in Cornwall receive about 6.9mSv a year Risks are tough to calculate correctly. We tend to overestimate the danger of the dramatic and unfamiliar. People fear nuclear power over coal power for much the same reason they worry more about shark attacks than traffic accidents. But fossil fuels are much more dangerous, by any standard. One back-of-the-envelope calculation from a recent report finds that the swap in nuclear power stations for fossil fuels after Chernobyl has resulted in the loss of '318 million life years' since 1986. Yet support for nuclear power is rising across the world, including in Britain. Why? Well, perhaps the most efficient way to shift perception of one threat is for another, larger one to come along . France's success can be explained by the oil crisis in 1973: the country was almost completely reliant on foreign oil; that problem ate the nuclear one. Now we are going through a similar moment of our own. Academics have used the term 'reluctant acceptance' to explain the shift in support as climate risks ramp up. But the real change may have come since the energy threats posted by the war in Ukraine. Campaigners should remember that their greatest advances are made not in the field of science, but in politics. Photograph by Adrian Dennis/AFP
The Sun
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Sun
Our political party system is shattering and Britain could soon become ungovernable
Days before the 2015 General Election, then Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: 'Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice - stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband.' Given the decade since: six Prime Ministers, four elections, Brexit gridlock, a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, partygate and the mini-budget, many rightly wonder: if that was stability, how bad could chaos have been? 3 But at the time, Cameron's pitch worked, partly because many Brits feared Labour might end up governing in a three-party combo with the Lib Dems and SNP, with the late former Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond calling the shots. Unlike our neighbours on the Continent, we aren't used to coalitions and dislike the idea of smaller parties potentially holding the Government to ransom. Fast forward to 2025 and it looks like Brits might have to get used to coalitions. Our political map has been reshaped. Fewer than half the public now describe themselves as strong supporters of any one party. The days of being 'a Labour family' or voting for 'anything with a blue rosette' are over. Voters are now far more promiscuous, shopping around to see what they like best. 3 As recently as 2017, the two main parties took over 80 per cent of the vote. That plummeted to 57 per cent in last year's election, a post-war low and our polling suggests it's fallen further still since - just 43 per cent now say they'd vote Labour or Tory. Instead, voters are turning to new emerging parties on the right and left. Last year's General Election was the first time post-war that more than three parties each won over ten per cent of the vote, and more than four won over five per cent. Why is this happening? More in Common's latest report Shattered Britain delves into what's behind our growing fragmentation. Simply put - it finds the old dividing lines of left and right no longer cut it. New political fault lines are emerging. These include whether we can fix a country many feel is broken by improving our institutions or, as 38 per cent think, we need to 'burn them all down'; whether the answers to our problems are common sense or complex; whether diversity strengthens or erodes British identity; and crucially whether we trust mainstream news or prefer independent voices online. Just as our politics is fragmenting, so too is where we get our information with a knock on effect on politics, reducing the stranglehold the big two parties have in communicating with the public. 3 None of these divides map neatly onto our existing political landscape and our First Past the Post system is struggling to cope as these new fault lines scatter Britons votes across multiple parties. More in Common's latest MRP - a model for projecting what the next Parliament might look like, helps to show how this might all play out: it suggests an election tomorrow could deliver a political map we've never seen before. Reform UK would come first on 290 seats, Labour trailing on 126, Tories barely third on 81, the Liberal Democrats snapping at their heels on 73. With 325 seats needed for a majority, the likeliest outcome would be a Reform UK–Tory coalition. But how comfortable would the Conservatives be as junior partners to Farage's Party, given the bad blood between them? Even those headline numbers hide more turbulence beneath the surface. Nearly 100 seats could be won on under 30 per cent of the vote and small shifts could flip many of them. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, voting for the first time at the next election, will make up just two to three per cent of the electorate, but in tight races, that could make all the difference. With only a modest Labour recovery from midterm blues and a Reform dip, we could end up with the only viable option being a five-party coalition: Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Greens and Plaid Cymru. How's that for a stable Government? And that's before factoring in Jeremy Corbyn's newly announced party, which our polling suggests could take 10 per cent of the vote, further muddying our electoral waters. At this stage it's fair to ask will the next Parliament be ungovernable? Maybe, but we've been here before. In 2019, the Brexit Party was topping the polls, the Lib Dems surged, and the two main parties were barely registering a third of the vote. Come election day, Boris Johnson won a stonking majority. In the early 1980s, the SDP–Liberal Alliance looked set to reshape politics, only to fall back. Still, as Britain drifts into uncharted political waters and the two main parties continue to struggle, it might be wise to use our summer holidays on the Continent to pick up a few tips on coalition-building from our European neighbours. THE UK used to be known worldwide for its stable, two party political system. The choice was binary: Tory or Labour. Elections nearly always delivered a majority government. But all that could be about to change. Old party allegiances have shattered. Our political system has become fragmented. Nigel Farage and his Reform Party have redrawn the political map and decimated the Tory vote. On the Left, Labour are being challenged by the rise of the Greens and creation of Jeremy Corbyn's far-left party. But that begs the question: is Britain about to become ungovernable? We are not used to Coalition governments - but all the evidence suggests we are about to get one. Pollsters say the most likely outcome is a Reform Tory Coalition. But can we really imagine Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch in bed together - after they have spent five years at each other's throats? The alternative is a rainbow coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, SNP, Greens, and Plaid Cymru. That's a dizzying mix. I doubt a government stuffed with so many different political personalities and policies would last five minutes - let alone five years. The result would surely be another snap election and yet more political turmoil? The next general election is still four years away and much can happen in that time. One thing is clear - voters are desperate for Britain to break out of its current quagmire. They want politicians who can actually get things done and aren't held to hostage by their backbenchers. It's why they gave Boris Johnson a majority to get Brexit done - and took it off him again when the Tories sank into civil war. It's why they handed Keir Starmer a landslide - then sent his poll ratings tumbling when he failed to come up with a big package of reforms. If the polls stay the same then it looks like Britain is heading for more political turbulence and a coalition. But who knows? Voters may decide to gamble big and hand Nigel Farage a majority next time. I wouldn't bet against it.
