ChatterBank0 min ago
Labour’s First 100 Days
I know it's difficult, but ignoring Starmer's (and many others) freebies, his rank hypocrisy, his crumbling to the unions, his betrayal of the old, his cronyism, them being more sleazy than the the Tories, and his clearly very limited ability, what has Labour done right in their first 100 days?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Yes douglas I agree. Going a bit off subject but Starmer also claims not to have known anything about Al Fayad, but he was in charge at the CPS at the time and Fayad would have been the highest profile figure under suspicion so surely he would have known something about it. Should he really be PM when he claims to know so little of anything.
Tomus, is it sensible to leave elderly people with a choice between eating or heating in winter? I can understand stopping the WFA for the wealthy but this less than bright idea is not restricted to the wealthy. As always it's the people in the middle who will suffer. Furthermore, if this government has done such a good thing why didn't they tell us what they had in mind before the election?
Tomus, you think Labour were right in stopping the WFA for every pensioner except for a very small minority in light of Starmer's strong opposition to the Tories consideration of the same thing in May this year?
What about Reeves very strong criticism of the Tories in 2012 when they refused to raise the WFA, accusing them of 'hitting pensioners hard'?
Liebour, the party of fake promises
“Off the top of my head, means testing the winter fuel payment, as per every other state benefit payment.”
The government classes the State Pension as a “benefit”. I would argue with that but that’s their stance. So should the State Pension be means tested as well?
“i like the plan for carbon capture.”
It’s just as well that you like the plan because that’s all it is. And it’s by no means a wizard wheeze that has been dreamt up by this government.
“it's a technology that is exportable and of huge value to green infrastructure because it allows carbon intensive processes like steelmaking to significantly reduce their impact”
It might be if it worked. The theory of Carbon Capture (CC) has been around for about forty years. However, CC has never been shown to work at large scale anywhere in the world. This is despite over three decades of research and billions of pounds, dollars and euros (almost all from either taxpayers or energy customers) being poured into it. More than 90% of projects have either failed or been abandoned and there is still no guarantee that any carbon that is captured will remain stored rather than leaking into the atmosphere.
As an example of this folly, Drax power station is now burning 7m tons of freshly felled timber every year. It is by far the largest emitter of CO2 in the country, emitting more than the next four largest power stations combined. It receives around £1bn per annum in direct subsidies and “carbon tax breaks” (? no, me neither). These huge sums are provided under the ridiculous notion that felling mature timber in the USA and Canada, processing it into pellets there and transporting it 5,000 miles by diesel powered ships and trains (120 trainloads each week) and burning it in Yorkshire is “Carbon Neutral”.
Having paid for the conversion of the far more efficient and less environmentally harmful coal-fired plant to burn wood (which it quaintly terms “biomass”) the government is now considering further £multi-billion subsidies for biomass with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Drax has been researching the technology for seven years and has managed to construct two small pilot schemes for storing captured carbon within the plant which have showed that the technology might work. They hope to have a large scale installation operational by 2030. Progress (or rather lack of it) in other locations around the world has shown, however, that is rather more a hope than a certainty.
If its CC scheme ever works, and since it runs at “net zero” emissions at present, Drax will then become “carbon negative”. If you cannot get your head around the principle that a plant burning 7m tons of wood can not only contribute no emissions to the country’s total, but actually serves to reduce that total, don’t worry as it is widely believed that CC is unlikely ever to work in commercial volumes.
And let's not forget the miles and miles of huge pylons that will soon be marching across the country to bring all the 'green' energy to where it's actually needed.
Milliband is determined to persevere with them, even though it can be cheaper to bury them - which is what the poor folk who will have to live next to them want.
This race to 'net zero' is nothing more than a farce; even if we achieved 'absolute zero' it would make practically no difference to the world.