Today at Party Conference Claire Coutinho outlined the importance of cheap, reliable energy to British growth and prosperity.
You can read her full speech below 👇
In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing
Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy.
Pitt and Peel who helped to unleash the coal-powered Industrial Revolution.
Stanley Baldwin spread electricity across the nation, after the First World War.
Mrs Thatcher’s North Sea oil boom got the nation back on its feet after those terrible years of Labour decline.
Today, there is not a single country on earth which has high growth, and low energy.
That’s because energy is not just part of the economy. It is the economy. It feeds into the costs of every business, every journey, every loaf of bread.
That’s why right now, the cost of energy is one of the biggest problems we have.
It’s a stealth tax that is making us all poorer.
And it’s killing our industry.
Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world.
And that has consequences.
British industries that use the most energy – like chemicals, glass, and metals – are shutting down week by week.
The fibreglass factory in Wigan. The refinery at Grangemouth. Vauxhall in Luton. The North Sea. We’re losing thousands of jobs by the month.
And we won’t need any less fibreglass, less gas, or fewer cars – we’ll just import more from abroad, often from countries still powered by coal.
Fewer jobs in Britain. Unilateral economic disarmament. For more carbon in the atmosphere.
And this isn’t just about the industries that we already have, the industries of the future need energy too – whether it’s advanced manufacturing or AI.
Whether it’s a factory, or a data centre, or a super-lab they will need cheap, reliable energy.
And they will go where they find it.
It would be the first time in generations that we would no longer be at the forefront of a technological revolution, and we will be poorer because of it.
Those businesses will be created, just not here in Britain.
We won’t have saved the planet, we will have failed the next generation.
And under Labour this is about to get worse.
At the last election Ed Miliband promised to cut bills by £300. Keir Starmer promised it. Rachel Reeves promised it.
Now last week Ed Miliband had some pretty choice words for Elon Musk about disinformation.
So, conference, we’ve got a return message for Ed Miliband.
If you want to talk about disinformation, where’s our flipping £300?
Far from cutting bills, bills keep going up – and every choice Ed has made is making it worse.
Ed says that building more wind farms will cut bills. But he’s signing up to prices that are the highest in a decade, well above the market price of electricity.
Look at this.
When he made his promise to cut bills, the price of electricity was £72. That’s that second bar in black you see.
Last year he bought offshore wind at £82, and this year he’s said he’s willing to pay up to £117.
Now, that’s before you add in the extra costs for connections, the backup, and the £8 billion we’ll soon be paying wind farms, not to generate any energy, but to turn off when there’s too much wind.
And what's worse, is that he’s extended the wind developer’s contracts to twenty years, locking us into these higher prices for longer.
You can think about it like this. He’s moving our energy onto a fixed-rate mortgage at 10%, because he doesn’t want to be on a 4% variable.
Anyone with half a brain can see that won’t cut bills.
Now , he says prices are going up because gas is expensive.
But that blue bar on the left, £55, that’s gas without taxes. You tell me what’s higher or lower.
It’s not hard is it?
He also said that Great British Energy would lead to, and I quote, a “mind-blowing” reduction in bills.
But it won’t generate any energy.
Only Ed Miliband could launch an £8 billion energy company that won’t produce any energy.
Let’s call it what it is. A vanity project that won’t cut bills. So we will scrap it.
I will give Ed credit for one thing though.
He’s managed to do something which is quite difficult, he’s managed to unite the Trade Unions, the Conservative Party, the voters, and Keir Starmer. How?
Because they all want the same thing.
Turns out they all want him sacked.
And here’s the problem with the Left – they’re infected with a poverty mindset.
They believe that Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero.
And they think that ordinary people should be the servants of their climate targets.
So, take air conditioning. In America, nearly every single home has air con. Here in Britain? Just 5%.
But Sadiq Khan’s London Plan effectively bans air con in all new homes - why?
Because it uses too much energy.
Rather than people fitting into the Government’s policy on energy, I believe a Conservative energy policy should serve the needs of the people.
Take the North Sea, Ed Miliband’s plans to ban new drilling would make us the only country in the world shutting down our own energy supplies.
Up to 200,000 jobs and twelve billion pounds in tax revenue lost.
Why? So that we can import more gas from Norway from the same fields we could drill ourselves.
Our imports of liquified gas have soared by over 40 per cent in a single year.
Conference, as long as we need gas, as much of it as possible should come from Britain.
That’s why we will scrap Ed’s mad ban on new oil and gas licenses, we will reverse the energy profits levy, and we will back the North Sea.
We will remember what has been forgotten for too long.
Energy is prosperity.
Now, we have to be honest. The poverty mindset has become inseparable from our climate legislation.
We shouldn’t have let it sit on the statute book for so long.
I wasn’t in Parliament in 2019 when the 2050 Net Zero target was set.
But I’ll tell you who was – Kemi Badenoch.
She was one of only two people in that entire debate who had the courage to speak up and ask about the costs.
When I came in as Energy Secretary, I started a reset to unpick some of what we got wrong in the face of huge opposition.
I started that reset because whilst we have halved our emissions, China has been doing this.
Global emissions are rising much, much faster than we can cut them here.
When something clearly isn’t working, we Conservatives should have the courage to tell the truth and say so.
Net Zero isn’t working for Britain, and it’s not working for the climate.
The British people are no stranger to sacrifice for a just cause.
But watching good jobs move abroad is not just.
Piling more pain onto people’s bills is not just.
And passing down a country that is less secure and less prosperous is not just.
For too many people, Net Zero has become a religion, and for too long we were an unthinking part of the congregation.
Here’s the problem with the legislation. We know it’s not working for climate change.
But it’s also forcing Ministers to make decisions that make people poorer.
Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act sets legally-binding targets.
Every five years, targets are drawn up that dictate what products people must buy, and when, and in what quantities, a decade into the future.
Conference, we had a name for that back in the 70s, it’s central planning.
If all of our industry shut tomorrow, and we replaced those goods with imports that would be a win for climate targets but a disaster for Britain.
If people don’t want a heat pump, the Act requires you to tax or ban them into it.
We are burning wood shipped here from America to produce electricity at three times the cost of gas, and four times the pollution levels of our last coal plant.
Why? Because it doesn’t count towards our climate targets.
Those ridiculous prices I just showed you for offshore wind, why would we have to buy any at those prices?
You guessed it. Our climate targets.
And here’s the truth, whether it was EU directives, or the Climate Change Committee, or the courts who rule on the activists’ cases, none of them are accountable to the people who will lose their jobs, or people who pay their energy bills, or who need to keep the lights on.
We handed too much control to people who pay no price for being wrong.
That was a profound mistake.
So, we will set out a new way of doing things.
Conference, I know many of you are proud lovers of the environment. I am too.
We will not cede that ground.
But we will set out new plans under Conservative principles.
Our first principle will be to back British innovation.
For too long when we talked about innovation, what we meant is that we would force Britain to be the early adopters of technology made in other parts of the world.
But look at these charts. Refrigerators, dishwashers, central heating. Here’s the thing, when new tech makes people’s lives better, people will buy it.
What we are doing is insisting everyone buys these products before they want to, just to meet a government target.
Rather than force our people to be the early adopters, I want us to be the early creators.
The early creators of technology we can export around the world.
We’re only 1% of emissions. 99% are happening elsewhere and they’re rising.
We clearly have not got this right yet. We have not created all of products we need.
But if we can create technologies that others can’t, that will be by far Britain’s biggest contribution to tackling climate change.
Our second principle will be to protect nature.
For centuries, environmentalism was the domain of ordinary people – people who were rooted in a sense of place and a love of home.
They wanted to protect and cherish the world they loved around them. Roger Scruton called this the “small-scale wisdom of the human heart”.
But nature is not Net Zero, in fact some of the time it pulls in the opposite direction.
I can think of no better image than this - the Amazon Rainforest being carved up to build a motorway to the latest Climate conference in Brazil.
But what’s worrying is that’s not so dissimilar to what we’re pursuing here.
On the left, that tiny dot is the land needed for a nuclear power plant, underneath is what’s needed to get the same amount of energy from wind and solar. Because wind and solar use up to 3,000 times more land.
To generate the same amount of power as a nuclear power station, you would need a wind farm the size of the New Forest, or a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight.
On a small island like ours where every inch of countryside is precious, that matters.
So instead of carpeting the countryside in wind and solar farms, we will make it easier and cheaper to build dense, reliable, secure, clean nuclear energy.
Our third and most important principle. Will be to prioritise cheap, abundant energy. And we will do that unashamedly.
That’s why the next Conservative Government will repeal the Climate Change Act.
If a law is not working in the national interest, it is not just possible for us to change it – it’s our duty to do so.
All it takes is courage.
Increasing the cost of electricity is the worst possible climate policy too.
If you want people to use electric cars, here’s a revolutionary idea. Make electricity cheap.
If you want people to use electric heating. Make electricity cheap.
If you want to build data centres, to cut bills, to reduce poverty and drive growth.
Make electricity cheap.
At the moment Labour’s giving handouts to people to buy electric cars and electric heating at the very same time they’re making electricity unbearably expensive. That’s back to front and we will reverse it.
Our priorities will be the priorities of the British people, a strong economy, protecting nature, and cutting bills.
So, conference, today I can announce the first policies from our Cheap Power Plan.
First up, the next Conservative Government will axe the Carbon Tax on electricity generation.
When Ed Miliband blames gas for high energy bills, what he doesn’t tell you is that over 30% of what we pay for gas power is not to pay for fuel, but to pay for a Carbon Tax that the government chooses to impose.
Now, we know we will need gas to keep the lights on for decades – so it just adds extra costs to our bills for no reason.
But here’s the rub - the Carbon Tax inflates the cost of almost all other types of electricity too.
So, all the wind and solar farm owners pocket those higher prices as higher profits.
And since the start of the year, guess what Ed has done to Carbon Taxes?
That.
We warned Ed about doing this. He didn’t listen.
Labour’s EU deal increased the Carbon Tax by 70 per cent in the space of 9 months.
They did not have to do this. It was a political choice. A political choice that we Conservatives fought against.
Axing the Carbon Tax would cut bills instantly by almost £8 billion a year.
Next. We’ll scrap Ed Miliband’s old rip-off wind farm subsidies.
Back in 2008, Ed Miliband, in his infinite wisdom, chose to double the subsidies on offer for wind farms.
That means when the wind blows, there are wind farms getting up to three times the market price of electricity – and you’re paying for that through your bills.
It’s the biggest racket going.
We closed the scheme when we were in office, but we’ll go further and say we must scrap those subsidies for good.
Our energy system is not here to prop up the profits of multi-million-pound wind developers at billpayers’ expense. It’s here to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the country.
Together, our policies to Axe the Carbon Tax and scrap Ed’s rip-off wind subsidies would cut people’s electricity bills by 20 per cent.
The average family will save £165 a year off their electricity bill.
And I realise this sounds less than the promises other parties have made.
Ed promised to cut your bills by £300, but we all know that’s a fantasy.
But Reform are just as bad.
They’ve promised to cut your electricity bill by £1,000.
Do you know how I know that’s garbage? The average bill is only £850. What’s he gonna do, go round writing people cheques?
If you think any politician can promise you electricity for free, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
They are just as ideological as Labour, it’s just the mirror image.
The difference with our policy is that this is real. It’s in the gift of Ministers. This could be done tomorrow. And it would cut your electricity bill by 20%.
So, I can promise you this. When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be vested interests, it won’t be fake promises we can’t deliver. It will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy.
Now Conference, being in opposition can be tough.
Although I’d like to thank the wider Energy team - Andrew, Malcolm, Nick, Greg, and Bradley for all their excellent work.
We know this half-baked tax-and-spend socialism of Labour is a disaster for Britain.
When we said in the election, that if you name it, Labour will tax it, we meant it.
There’s a farmer’s tax, a groceries tax, a jobs tax, a jets tax, a lets tax and a bets tax, an oil tax, the soil tax, and a boiler tax. There’s even rumours of a taxi tax!
The truth is they would rather tax the pants off this country than get their spending under control.
And it reveals a fundamental belief.
If you try to do well for yourself, get a good job, pay for your child’s education, buy a house, start a successful business – they don’t celebrate you.
They sneer at you.
They want to redistribute away your success.
They talk about poverty like they care.
But their policies are making energy, food, childcare and housing more expensive.
And their answer is always more redistribution rather than confronting the truth that this Government is choosing, choosing to raise the cost of almost every basic good.
Now, Reform I’m afraid to say have the economic policies of Jeremy Corbyn. They’re promising nationalisations we can’t afford, more tax for more welfare, more spending, which means more borrowing, which means more debt for our children.
If Government is here to serve the liberties of the people, that means allowing them to keep more of the money that they earn.
Now Conference, we know growth is the biggest challenge we face.
But growth is not created by Government subsidies. It is created by millions of people.
And I worry, our system as it stands is teaching people to be less capable than they are.
We cannot survive if our culture becomes a competition of victimhood.
The risk is people start to ask themselves, not what can I do, but why bother at all?
Every person who takes on more hours, comes up with bright ideas, take risks, saves and invests in their future and their family’s future.
Personal agency.
The sense that you can take control of your life and reap the rewards of your efforts.
That’s the real engine of growth.
Everything we do as a Party will be in their interests.
And we will start by giving them cheaper energy.
Thank you.
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