Labour plans to save the planet - by destroying the English countryside
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. That certainly applies to the Labour Party's green energy policy.
What's left of the English countryside is a wonder of the world. A bucolic landscape of rolling hills, farmland, woodlands and picturesque villages.
It won’t be bucolic for much longer, if Labour energy secretary Ed Miliband has his way.
Miliband is about to do to the English countryside what he famously did to a bacon sandwich during his hopeless 2015 election campaign. Take a huge bite out of it, and leave it a twisted, unsightly mess.
He must be stopped.
One of the Labour government's very first acts was to repeal the ban on developing onshore wind farms, with Miliband the driving force.
As he recently told a conference of wind farm developers, his “mission” involves doubling onshore wind and trebling the number of solar farms, many of them built on arable land.
The wind turbines he is planning won’t be the ones you and I know today.
Instead of 300ft high, they’ll be up to 850ft tall. They will be visible for miles and miles, destroying our finest landscapes.
Local councils won’t be able to stop them. Miliband is seizing the power to plonk them wherever he wants, regardless of the wishes of local communities.
That's because he knows local communities will fight them to the end. Especially when they discover Miliband's rules have a presumption in favour of “large‑scale wind energy developments”.
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Miliband will turn what’s left of our green and pleasant land into an unsightly sprawl of wind turbines, solar farms, power lines, electricity substations, battery storage facilities, cables and roads.
The construction process will be horrendous, too.
I was enjoying a staycation in unspoiled coastal Suffolk last week, but it may not be an area of outstanding beauty for much longer.
National Grid plans to plaster it in major new electricity infrastructure projects. It will force locals to sell their land and plonk 25-metre high power plants right next to their homes.
My friends there are shaking with rage.
Miliband will turn cherished rural landscapes into industrial wastelands, plastered with vast concrete monoliths more than 25 metres high.
He's a fanatic. Don't believe me? Check out the toe-curling a video of him on Twitter, strumming a ukulele while murdering Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the wind" to a backdrop of turbines.
It will remind you why voters shunned him in 2015.
PM Keir Starmer is backing this oaf by pledging to “bulldoze” through our planning system – and the countryside.
It’s the only idea he or chancellor Rachel Reeves have of generating growth.
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I accept global warming is real. I've no time for climate denialists. But Labour’s Great British Energy concept is a vague and wafty plan dreamed up purely to appease party activists and ecofanatics.
Labour hasn't explained how it will actually work. It almost certainly won't.
As for the idea that this will create 650,000 jobs. Labour hasn't shown us how. Instead, its Net Zero push could cost us a staggering £800billion.
That's seven or eight times as much as HS2, another stupid vanity project that tore up the countryside and blighted people's lives.
Wasting taxpayers money on projects that will do almost nothing to stem climate change is bad enough. Destroying England's natural beauty to do it is even worse.
The UK cannot save the planet on its own. But Miliband seems thrilled to sacrifice the glorious English countryside in the attempt.
