Contribution
This is the first time I am at the Dispatch Box opposite the shadow Secretary of State; I congratulate her on her new baby boy and welcome her back to the House of Commons. I know from my own personal experience that crying at night is challenging, but who is surprised, given the state of the Conservative party?
I think the shadow Secretary of State and I have a number of differences. The fundamental difference is this: she wants to gamble in the fossil fuel casino—she wants to gamble on fossil fuel prices. That is what the Conservatives did when they were in office, and it led to the worst cost of living crisis in generations. [Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State says from a sedentary position that it is not true. It absolutely is true, and I think she needs to get out there more and hear what people have to say to her. It ruined family finances, it ruined business finances and it ruined the public finances. And what do they do? Do the Conservatives come along, after their worst election defeat in 200 years, and think, “Well, maybe we got it a bit wrong. Maybe we should think again”? No, they double down on a failed strategy. That is the first point.
The second point is this. The shadow Secretary of State says that we have a problem of constraint costs—that it is really a problem that we do not have the infrastructure that the country needs. She is absolutely right, but who was in charge for 14 years? Don’t just take my word for it, by the way. I notice that her colleague the shadow Energy Minister, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), is not in his place, but he said that it is absurd that, after 14 years of Conservative Government, we are now in a situation where it is more difficult to build critical national infrastructure than it was before they came into power and that it costs more. That is what we have got: the grid system was massively backed up, the planning system was in disrepute, and the network and transmission infrastructure was not built.
The third point is that the shadow Secretary of State now says, “Okay, well let’s forget about the past. Ignore my record—airbrush it out. Let’s build the grid.” Too right we should build the grid, but she is opposing new clean energy infrastructure all around the country. She is going around saying, “Oh, it’s terrible. We shouldn’t be having this happening.” So at the level of strategy and what is the right thing for the country, at the level of her record and why we are in this position, and at the level of what she is doing now, I am afraid she is in the wrong place.
Now, what are we doing? We are actually changing all of this. In the period that the shadow Secretary of State has been away, we have seen a whole set of decisions made that the Conservatives talked about but never delivered. On nuclear power, they talked a lot about Sizewell and small modular reactors and all that, but they did not actually deliver it. We are—with over £40 billion of private investment in clean power unblocked and a record-breaking renewables auction.
By the way, the shadow Secretary of State says that I am somehow on the side of the wind developers. No, Madam Deputy Speaker; I am on the side of UK Steel, Make UK, the British Chambers of Commerce, Ceramics UK and businesses across the country who have said that this is the right decision for the country. [Interruption.] She mentions bills. Let me address that directly. My strategy and my belief is that a clean power system can bring down bills for good, because that is that way that we lower wholesale prices and get off the rollercoaster. Home-grown clean power is the answer for Britain, and I suggest that, now she is back in her post, she does some hard thinking about the past, about strategy and about what is right for Britain.