Ed Miliband just made a £600m 'mistake' that's left me asking if he can grasp basic maths

If there’s one thing that frustrates me more than anything it’s the Labour lot’s bizarre obsession with lefty dogma.

One of the current fixations for the PM Sir Keir Starmer and his cabinet is the religion of Net Zero that they all seem to worship at the altar of, regardless of any reasonable criticisms.

I don’t think anyone with a brain disputes that the world needs to do something drastic about climate change. But the sad truth is that until everyone gets aboard - read China and India - our relatively small country’s efforts are just screaming into the void.

In the meantime jobs and lifestyles are being impacted today in the rush to cover the whole of the UK in a ULEZ-style nightmare from which we can’t escape.

The latest Labour Net Zero mishap should have everyone tearing their hair out in frustration. It involves the energy secretary Ed Miliband who seems absolutely hell bent on plonking pylons the length and breadth of our beautiful countryside.

Surely, I hear you cry, he must have a very good reason for this awful decision that rightly has local residents utterly furious about hordes of the ugly structures scarring their area?

Nope.

In Labour’s strange scramble to hit its new 2030 Net Zero clean energy target, Miliband is steaming ahead with a plan to inflict a large scale pylon roll-out from Norwich to Tilbury, despite a report revealing that underground cables would actually be cheaper if they adhered to the original target set by the previous Tory government.

The Norwich to Tilbury development would see 520 pylons, each 164 feet tall, supporting a new high-voltage electricity transmission line and would carry electricity generated by offshore wind farms through the Waveney Valley towards London.

But the East Anglia network report revealed that using a 2034 timeframe, an underground cable system would come in £600 million cheaper than using pylons.

Another campaigner against the pylons called for an integrated offshore grid in the North Sea which she claimed would be £2billion cheaper than the “current unplanned approach”.

It’s sparked fury from the local Tory MP who has accused Miliband of being “ideologically committed to pylons”.

He’s right.

I live in Teesside where a focus on green energy could actually help revolutionise our area - with a focus on capturing carbon, creating clean energy and many thousands of jobs. But it’s been a calm and considered leap forward for the region based on evidence.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Rosie Pearson, founder of the Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk Pylons campaign group.

She said: "Embarrassingly, Starmer does not even understand that modern undergrounding, known as 'HVDC', is cheaper than pylons. His refusal to try to understand the issues is deeply frustrating.

“If Starmer and Miliband took the time to read the evidence and meet councils and communities they would understand that not only is HVDC undergrounding cheaper and less damaging than pylons, so is an integrated offshore grid.”

Starmer and Miliband, please take note.