Unless the Conservatives come clean about the energy mess they created, they will never deserve our vote/The Telegraph

By James Delingpole
‘Ceci n’est pas un husky.’
Just how stupid does Lynton Crosby think we are?
Very, very, VERY stupid, I’m guessing. And perhaps he’s right. As part of his ongoing campaign to make the Conservatives more electable, he’s inviting us to experience the biggest outbreak of collective amnesia since Odysseus and his crew visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He wants us to forget the huskies. And the melting glaciers. And Dave’s announcement – from Greenpeace’s HQ, no less – that he was going to lead “the greenest government ever”. And to tell ourselves that all these unpopular wind and solar farms, all these rocketing energy prices have nothing whatsoever to do with husky-hugging Dave, leader of the greenest government ever, but with someone else entirely.
Richard North smells a rat here.
I do too. Lots of rats, actually.
Here’s one rat. (Actually, he reminds me more of a neutered poodle). His name is Greg Barker and here he is pretending to feel our pain about all the wind farms blighting our countryside. He’s dressing it up as a mea culpa: Energy Minister admits that some wind farms have been put in “the wrong place.” But it is nothing of the kind. It is part of the Conservatives’ cynical strategy to try to railroad through its offshore wind farms – by trying to sell them to a gullible public as a preferable alternative to onshore wind.
And we’re supposed to be grateful for this? Isn’t this a bit like being told by the army besieging your City: “Hey, trapped citizens. Great news! We’ve taken note of your objection that, once you’ve let us through the gates, we’re going to impale every man, woman and child on hot spikes. So instead – we’re going to chop your heads off.”
The disastrous Navitus Bay and Atlantic Array offshore projects – the ones which will ruin the Dorset coast and utterly devastate the setting of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, after all, will require far more taxpayer subsidy (200 per cent, as opposed to 100 per cent) for their useless, intermittent, unreliable, bird-killing, bat-chomping, view-blighting, peace-disturbing, sleep-destroying energy than any onshore wind farms. (Sorry: I can’t bring myself to care about the project off Brighton. It’s God’s punishment for voting Green).
The new deal with the French and the Chinese to build a nuclear power station at Hinckley Point – so iniquitous and wrong that even George Monbiot realises it’s a bad idea – is another case in point. It’s as terrible as those disastrous PFI hospitals that were inflicted on us in the Blair era: inept government negotiators and greedy corporatists stitching up the market in way that is entirely beyond the consumer’s control. How, in all conscience, can the Coalition express concern about energy prices while simultaneously boasting about their success in striking a deal (for antediluvian technology) which is going to drive them sky high. As Peter Glover says here mini-nukes would have made far more sense.
Or consider the 2008 Climate Change Act, against which only five MPs voted against. The rest – including David Cameron – were apparently all for introducing the most expensive and pointless legislation in British parliamentary history, guaranteed to cost the taxpayer £18.3 billion a year in needless expenditure (on dubious technologies like carbon capture; and, of course, on wind turbines) till 2050. Yes Ed Miliband may ushered it in as Secretary of State for Energy And Climate Change. But it’s not as if anyone on the Conservative benches – save Peter Lilley, Christopher Chope and Andrew Tyrie – opposed it.
We have two years until the next General Election and what is already clear as a result of Ed Miliband’s price freeze bribe is that energy prices are going to become a major issue. The only party that has a leg to stand on energy is UKIP, which has consistently noted the flaws in the supposed IPCC consensus and the economic and socio-political dangers of the drive towards unreliable, expensive renewables and the failure to exploit our vast shale gas reserves.
What will be fascinating is to observe how Cameron and co attempt to wriggle out of a mess almost entirely of their own making. There was no need to embrace all that greenery in the way that did. (Whatever Sam Cam may have whispered in Dave’s ear). And God knows, it’s not as though they haven’t had enough opportunities in the last three years to readjust their policies in the light of events. Scarcely a week goes by these days without the Global Warming Policy Foundation presenting such irrefutable evidence from around the world of the disasters being wrought by bad energy policy, and of the decreasing credibility of Man-Made Global Warming Theory. The Conservatives’ ongoing failure in this regard ought to be the single best recruiting sergeant UKIP has.