Keir Starmer needs to rein in Ed Miliband

Within the space of a week Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has taken key decisions to hasten the “decarbonisation” of the electricity grid. In doing so, he has ridden roughshod over local objections and even the advice of his own officials.
Mr Miliband says he is cutting through the bureaucracy and sclerotic planning regime that encumbered the Tory government for years. But in reality he is playing fast and loose with the country’s energy and food security.

He has ordered an immediate halt to new licences to extract oil and gas in the North Sea, ensuring that the country will have to increase imports of such fuels for years to come. Now he has unilaterally given the go-ahead for Britain’s biggest solar farm on agricultural land in eastern England.

The scheme had been rejected by the planning inspectorate and will take up land usually used for growing crops. We are supposed as a country to be seeking greater food independence, yet such decisions will, as with energy, make us more reliant on foreign imports.

Mr Miliband is right that nationally important infrastructure schemes have been hampered by planning hold-ups and local objections – fracking projects, for instance. Yet he is not proposing to allow those to go ahead. 

People campaigning against the National Grid’s plans for hundreds of miles of pylons criss-crossing the country must now realise that whatever they say, Mr Miliband will just do as he pleases.

What matters is not some macho demonstration of his ability to make quick decisions but to make the right ones in the long-term interests of the country. Sacrificing agricultural land on the altar of net zero is not among them. The Prime Minister needs to rein him in before he does further damage.