RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: If you thought the Tories' plans to make us colder and poorer were totally mad, you ain't seen nothing yet!
You couldn't make it up. The launch of Labour's green revolution got off to a stuttering start in Edinburgh when the eco-friendly, hydrogen-powered bus booked to ferry journalists to Keir Starmer's press conference failed to turn up.
No explanation was given and the vehicle was hurriedly replaced by a planet-destroying diesel, which promptly took the wrong turning after leaving the station.
Instead of heading east to Leith, the driver set off west towards Glasgow. Fortunately, Scottish Daily Mail reporter Tom Eden was able to point him in the right direction. Cue jokes about 'another Labour U-turn'.
This wasn't the first time a Labour leader had been left red-faced on the launchpad. Back in 1987, I was one of the Press pack covering Neil Kinnock's General Election campaign.
Labour had hired a plane — an old prop-driven DC-3, left over from World War II — to transport us around the country.
The launch of Labour's green revolution got off to a stuttering start in Edinburgh when the eco-friendly, hydrogen-powered bus booked to ferry journalists to Keir Starmer's press conference failed to turn up. Pictured: Sir Keir in Edinburgh on Monday
Everybody back on the coach!
Yesterday's hydrogen-related hiccup is hardly a disaster of Hindenburg airship proportions. If the polls are to be believed, Starmer is on course to be our next Prime Minister. No, the real disaster will come about if Labour's green revolution ever reaches fruition. In economic terms, that will make the Hindenburg explosion look like a damp squib.
The only surprise yesterday was that Ed Miliband wasn't driving the bus. After all, he's in the driving seat when it comes to formulating Labour's energy policy.
If you thought the Tories' plans to make us all colder and poorer were bad enough, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Starmer seems to have sub-contracted control of Net Zero to his North London Green Manalishi. It has been a remarkable comeback by the ex-Labour leader, who should have been dead and buried after losing the 2015 election.
Remember the embarrassing 'EdStone' gimmick? That may have been smashed to smithereens, but Miliband now seems determined to revive the idea, by erecting a giant green headstone at the grave of what remains of Britain's energy capacity and security.
Mister Ed set us on the road to ruin in 2008, when he was Gordon Brown's climate supremo. He announced an arbitrary 80 per cent of Britain's carbon emissions would be cut by 2050, a target way beyond any other country, with no clue as to how much it would cost.
The real disaster will come about if Labour's green revolution ever reaches fruition. In economic terms, that will make the Hindenburg explosion look like a damp squib
The only surprise yesterday was that Ed Miliband (pictured) wasn't driving the bus. After all, he's in the driving seat when it comes to formulating Labour's energy policy
Although there wasn't — and still isn't — any credible way of achieving that goal, it was passed into law with a shameful lack of Parliamentary scrutiny.
The Conservatives, first under Call Me Dave, then Mother Theresa and Boris, lacked the courage to rip up this insane economic suicide note, anxious as they were to clamber on the green bandwagon.
In 2019, 80 per cent was increased to 100 per cent, without any kind of vote in the Commons. The Tories have banned fracking, and are already phasing out petrol and diesel cars and coal-fired power stations. Gas boilers will have to be replaced by expensive and inefficient heat pumps.
Yet still no politician can adequately explain where all the power is going to come from, especially as the infrastructure required for charging electric vehicles is woefully inadequate.
About the only concession to public opinion the Conservatives have made is maintaining a moratorium on onshore windfarms, where local communities object.
Even that doesn't go far enough for Starmer and his Net Zero guru Miliband. Yesterday, Starmer announced that the ban on onshore windmills will be scrapped by an incoming Labour government.
While he has backpedalled on tearing up existing oil and gas licences in the North Sea, he still believes that Britain's clean energy future is blowing in the wind.
Maybe if he'd opened his eyes in Scotland yesterday, he'd have paused for thought. One of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth has been comprehensively vandalised by the proliferation of these War Of The Worlds monstrosities. Not only are they utterly useless when the wind doesn't blow, they have to be turned off when it gets above a stiff breeze.
Starmer does support the establishment of a new stand-alone, state-run outfit called GB Energy, another Miliband brainwave, with an £8 billion budget to invest in 'renewables and emerging technologies'
Despite agreeing not to cancel North Sea licences retrospectively, Starmer is signed up to Miliband's madcap obsession with eliminating fossil fuels altogether.
That's regardless of the fact that in Scotland alone it is estimated 150,000 jobs depend directly or indirectly on the North Sea. No wonder the unions are furious.
It's worth remembering that not so long ago, in 1984, Labour went ballistic when the Tories proposed closing 20 loss-making collieries, with 20,000 redundancies. A year-long miners' strike, called without a ballot, only served to accelerate that process.
Now Starmer and Miliband appear quite happy to sacrifice more than seven times that number of jobs on the altar of Net Zero. The claim that the slack will be taken up by new jobs in clean energy is at best wishful thinking, at worst risible nonsense.
(One of the few British firms which stands to benefit is Ecotricity, the clean energy company run by Just Stop Oil backer Dale Vince, who coincidentally just happens to have donated £1.5 million to Labour, which Starmer refuses to give back.)
Given that even most politicians, apart from Net Zero fanatics like the Just Stop Oil cheerleaders, acknowledge gas and oil will continue to be part of the mix for decades to come, we will have to fall back on imports to make up the shortfall. That means Britain will have to rely, in large part, on supplies from unstable and often hostile regimes and dictatorships such as Russia and Saudi Arabia to keep the lights on. Where's the sense in that?
All we will be doing is outsourcing our carbon emissions to satisfy the vanity of here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians and the kind of headbangers who spend their days stopping the traffic and throwing soup at works of art.
You won't be surprised to learn that Miliband considers Extinction Rebellion 'exciting' and told a conference in 2019 that their protests have been a 'fantastic success'.
Does Starmer agree? Who knows? It depends who he's talking to. Despite his enthusiasm for Miliband's scorched earth plans, he is also reported to be cooling on his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves's £28 billion green 'investment' programme, based on Joe Biden's green energy initiative — laughingly known as the 'deficit reduction act'.
Yet under Biden, America is now once again importing oil from dubious regimes such as Venezuela, after becoming a net exporter under the hated Donald Trump. And the U.S. embraces fracking, which is one reason gas bills are up to five times lower than in Britain.
America also has an extensive nuclear programme. And while it does have giant windfarms, these tend to be in remote areas such as the Mojave Desert and deep in the heart of Texas, not towering over centres of population.
Britain by comparison is tiny and the effects of onshore turbines can be devastating, not just on the landscape but on the sanity of those unfortunate enough to live in their shadow.
One thing you can be certain of, though, is that there won't be any windmills erected on Hampstead Heath, in Starmer and Miliband's backyard.
Starmer does support the establishment of a new stand-alone, state-run outfit called GB Energy, another Miliband brainwave, with an £8 billion budget to invest in 'renewables and emerging technologies'.
Sounds to me like nationalisation by any other name, or a return to the failed policy of ministers and civil servants 'picking winners', even though Starmer insists otherwise.
So why bother? And where's the money coming from at a time when taxes are already at a 70-year high?
The only chink of light in this madness came yesterday in East London, where a group of schoolchildren turned on Just Stop Oil protesters making them late for class.
Given that these kids will have had Net Zero propaganda rammed down their throats since they started nursery school, this was a remarkable development. Maybe all is not lost.
But for now, we are lumbered with the prospect of an incoming Labour government, committed to an energy policy set by a pair of metropolitan North London lefties wedded to an unworkable, ruinous future which will wreck the economy, cost billions of pounds we haven't got and leave us shivering in the dark in our own homes.
If you want an apt metaphor for Labour's insane green revolution, look no further than that mysteriously missing hydrogen-powered bus in Edinburgh yesterday. Mail.
