Labour is treating our beautiful UK countryside like a building site – we must stop it
Labour is, as ever, stuck in the past and the party's attitude must change, warns Tory MP Greg Smith.
The Labour Government has arrived with an unhealthy impatience to make rapid decisions, using their mega-majority to steamroller a multitude of hastily and ill-thought-out changes through. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of energy.
Before a single MP had sworn in, Milliband had signed off over 6,000 acres of solar installations on agricultural land, arguing rural communities just had to suck it up. But why this preposterous rush for solar? Why jump the gun ahead of the publication of a land use strategy?
We are a small island, with around 60% self-sufficiency in food production. Food security is national security. But apparently not to Labour, whose derisory 87 words on farming and rural affairs in their manifesto simply prove they see rural communities as building sites, not the engine room of food production.
I have long argued that to de-fossilise and decarbonise our energy and fuel, there are other and better ways. We don’t have to immediately salute the first available technology that comes along.
You need approximately 2,000 acres of solar panels to generate, when the sun actually shines, enough electricity for 50,000 homes (at current usage before everyone is forced to have two Teslas). A small modular reactor on the other hand needs just two football pitches and will generate enough power for a million homes. How can anyone rationally take those two options and pick solar?
Similarly, there is a curious obsession with battery electric power for vehicles, in a market where early adopters have peaked and may even now be retreating.
Even after the sale of new petrol and diesel cars is banned, there will still be around 1.4 billion internal combustion engine cars on the road.
Our great innovators and scientists have come up with carbon-neutral, fossil-free, synthetic fuels. Where is the government’s excitement to embrace this technology? Not just for cars but heavy goods vehicles, ships, aircraft, agricultural machinery and more? The attitude remains stuck in the past, in the infant technology that’s hardly turning consumers' heads in the real marketplace.
For real clean energy solutions, that are for the long term, this attitude needs to change. And in their first few weeks, Labour are, as ever, stuck in the past.
Greg Smith is the Conservative MP for Mid-Bucks
