Claire Coutinho

Let me tell the hon. Lady. Under the last Labour Government, which the Energy Secretary was part of—[Interruption.] Let me explain. Not a single new nuclear power plant was started. When we came into power in 2015 and got control of the energy brief, there was one nuclear welder left in the country. It is the stop-start approach that kills the nuclear industry. Here is the problem: the Government have killed the pipeline again. These are the same old mistakes, and I am raising them because we are getting into the same trouble again—[Interruption.] The Ministers say that those were not mistakes and that it was not a mistake not to start a single new nuclear power plant. That is what they think, on the record. On to the North Sea. Andy Burnham, who is hoping to be Labour leader, talked yesterday about reindustrialisation. Meanwhile, today the Secretary of State is asking his Back Benchers to vote to shut down the North sea. This is the single greatest act of industrial self-harm we have seen in a generation. Only a complete wacko would respond to a supply shortage by shutting down their own oil and gas industry. We are in the absurd position of the Labour Chancellor thanking Canada and Norway for increasing their oil and gas production while her own Government are shutting down British production. And why? It is so we can be more reliant on higher-emission gas from Qatar or the US and so we can send billions of pounds to Norway to import gas from the very same basin that we could be drilling ourselves. The Government are calling this energy independence. Have they lost their mind?