Last night I spoke on the panel at another of the Circle Club’s public debates. This festive little number was on a huge and serious topic, but one well worth talking about, not least because of current events, but I believe because we need to address the fact that the government isn’t showing any vision for how we would provide energy security for our country.
It was nice to finally meet Chris Paul, Labour activist who has certainly had things to say about me in the past, despite never having met me before, and he was there representing ‘Labour against the war’.
Energy was the main element I wished to speak about, however there didn’t seem the appetite for such a debate, some people seemed to prefer to air their own bitterness and prejudices rather than thinking about the big questions facing out country. Not surprising in that case that they were strong Labour supporters, and there couldn’t have been a better example of how Labour lacks the talent, ideas and vision for the country.
One gentleman in particular, I forget his full name, but a journalist named Bill had a great deal he wanted to shout about. You couldn’t have wished for a more narrow minded socialist fossil than this gentleman. In the middle of me talking about how our defence spending has been falling as we’ve been asking our troops to do more, even this very mild criticism of the government was too much for him. He started shouting about Thatcher (who never lied to parliament to take our country into an illegal war) who he said destroyed this country, and seemed to want us to believe that the minor strike was a far worse atrocity that an illegal war that Labour took us into and has cost thousands of lives. Given that there was at least one Iraqi man in the audience, who will have lost people he knows and family, I thought it not just a stupid comment, but actually rather sick, in the context. The Labour apologists simply cannot take responsibility for what their party has done, they must squirm and blame everyone else but the people responsible – it was according to this gentleman, Israel and America’s fault we went to war, nothing to do with Labour, Tony Blair or our government. How are we to have democracy and hold people to account for their actions in such a context?
So incredibly entrenched in spin (as it clearly still is – Brown saying he would take 1000 troops home by Christmas, but 250 of this number were already home, and 500 he’d already announced, so he actually had 250 to announce!) this ‘journalist’ wanted it to be the fault of the Americans, and then a Zionist conspiracy, which he thought was the only reason negative world events take place. It never ceases to amaze me when I meet ‘proper’ socialists what prejudiced people some of them are. They are so willing to blame one group in society, or the world, for a multitude of ills, and wish to hold a specific group responsible. I find this worryingly naive and so similar to authoritarian doctrines (such as the Nazis) and the problem for a democracy is that this simply hides the actual reasons for events, and lets people responsible off the hook.
This kind of talk is simply pathetic, and it horrifies me that anyone such as that can call themselves a journalist, someone who is clearly so uninterested in current events, and can only look back and not forwards. This was in contrast to an Iraqi gentleman, Mr Issa, who spoke with passion about how his country has been changed, pitting elements of society against eachother in order to divide and rule, which was very sad to hear about.
If we can take one positive thing from these conflicts its that we need to quickly change our country and address its energy supply. Some of the problems are as follows
- 7 of our 16 nuclear reactors are out of service, with no plans for decommissioning or new ones.
- Britain has 2% of its energy from renewable sources, and Brown has admitted we’re not going to get to the EU target of 20%.
- Germany currently has reached 10% and leads the way in these new technologies, new science and business opportunities that Labour has been terribly poor in supporting and promoting. The figures speak for themselves.
- Every 1$ on the price of a barrel of oil is 1 billion dollars in the coffers of the Kremlin. Russia has doubled its defence spending in the last 3 years, and Iran has hugely increased its spending on its military due to its oil windfall, and has a much larger army than ours.
Places like California have been leading the way with new technologies and are really making huge headway. If we want to have renewable energy, we now have to buy products from Germany in order to be able to do so. Peel Holding PLCs new wind farm they are currently construcing is using windmills and all other components shipped over from Germany.
The Conservatives have proposed an energy revolution, following Germany where the wind renewable micro generator sector now employs 250,000 people and the sector as a whole is soon to be worth 100 billion worldwide. We need to have decentralised energy, not relying on a huge national grid, already in need to huge amounts of money to bring it up to date. A revolution where, as in Germany, Smart Meters can be used for people to sell back to the grid the energy they produce from their micro-generators (schools, office blocks, individuals). Labour opposes these meters that have been so successful in Germany in showing people what they use, so they can take responsibility of the energy they use themselves. Remember, in the New York blackouts, buildings with their own micro-generators were unaffected.
If we are to spend the massive amounts of money that we will need to renew our independent nuclear deterrent, what is the point of doing so unless we also have an energy policy that makes us more independent too. Its a complete fallacy to suggest the independent nuclear deterrent makes us safer and able to act on our own for our country’s best interests without being bound to others, when we’re going to be increasingly dependant of volatile, unstable places for our energy. Russia, with 1/7th of the worlds oil and massive gas supplies will become increasingly important, and we don’t have an OPEC-like system for dealing with them. Our military is shrinking while others are growing. Our energy policy from Brown’s Labour government is simply lip service and will leave us even more vulnerable, creating instability for the future with inaction now.
