Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan: ‘no such thing as a free lunch’

Edinburgh was “a brave choice as the venue for the launch of Keir Starmer’s new energy and climate policy”, said Fiona Harvey and Severin Carrell in The Guardian. It “showed a willingness to face head-on Labour’s energy dilemma”: how to move the UK to a low carbon footing, without destroying jobs.

With a 200,000-strong North Sea oil workforce, and nearly half of the UK’s onshore wind farms, Scotland is “caught between the fossil fuel past and the renewable future”. Starmer’s message was that it could have both, with a carefully managed transition: a Labour government will end new North Sea oil and gas exploration, but will honour projects that have already been approved. It will also create a publicly owned green energy company, based in Scotland, which will coordinate a “Local Power Plan”.

Communities across the UK will receive discounts – such as council tax reductions – if they sign up to new “clean energy” projects.

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“No serious politician questions the wisdom of a transition to clean energy,” said The Times. And Starmer’s plans are mostly “convincing”, at least in principle. It makes sense, for instance, to lift the de facto ban on onshore wind farms in England. But the North Sea moratorium seems “myopic”. Whatever happens, Britain will use oil and gas for decades to come. Why should it not be British oil and gas, funding “well-paid jobs in Scotland”?

Labour’s position is a sly compromise, said David Bol in The Herald.

Letting the Tories give the green light to some new projects – including possibly the “controversial and gigantic” Rosebank oil field off Shetland – allows the transition to take place over a longer period. But it also means that this Government will do much of the “dirty work”.

Labour’s plans are fairly chaotic, said Martin Ivens on Bloomberg. Until last week, the party’s flagship policy was to spend a colossal £28bn a year on green growth – more, relative to the UK economy, than even the US is spending in subsidies. But after a “battle royale” between the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the energy spokesman, Ed Miliband, this plan has now been put on ice.

The race to net zero is supposedly the great political goal of our time, said Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. But the debate lacks one important ingredient: honesty.

Both Labour and the Tories are promising new green jobs in the hundreds of thousands, cheaper heating bills, less reliance on foreign energy.

We’re also being asked to believe that this will happen “at zero financial cost”. This cannot be right: there will be winners and losers; for some, there will be pain. Our leaders must come clean. We know there is no such thing as a free lunch.