Jesse Norman

I thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to exercise my quadriceps on several occasions. Yes, of course I unhesitatingly withdraw that appalling term from the record. All this, I should say, comes from the hon. Member for Clacton after a lifetime spent denouncing Davos as a hub of evil globalist elites where, in his words, there is “no space for the little man”. At least we know that that is not true any more. Oh, the irony of it all, Mr Speaker! A wildly anti-establishment figure and long-time member of the Reform club—no relation—now joining the globalist elites. Can it be long before he aspires to join the Garrick club, or indeed joins the Prime Minister in professing publicly that he prefers Davos to Westminster? Amid all this nonsense, other, very serious changes are under way. Last week, the Government published the results of the latest auction for renewable energy, which set a floor price for renewables of £91 per kilowatt-hour. No one in this House disputes the importance of green energy, or the importance of renewables in the energy mix—[Interruption.] Few sane people dispute the value of green energy, but energy prices are already unfeasibly high for British businesses and, despite the Government’s promises, are set to go higher still, especially once the cost of new nuclear is added in. The effect of the policy will be to punish taxpayers, and of course bill payers, but it is also a form of corporate welfare, because the only benefits will come to the better-off. Meanwhile, the Government have decided to ignore North sea oil and gas, gravely damage the north-east of Scotland, undermine the employment of thousands of skilled workers, in disagreement with their own unions, and import gas from overseas at greater cost, with more carbon and more carbon miles. In its own way, this is a repetition of the private finance initiative scandal of 30 years ago, in which the country paid tens of billions of pounds more than it should have for public infrastructure, and a lot of wealthy people in the City of London—now resident in overseas countries—made out like bandits. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a little book called “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” about the disastrous effects of the treaty of Versailles and the demands that it made for payment from the other side in the first world war. I am not suggesting for a second that there is any comparison between these times and those, in Weimar Germany and the rest of it, but I will say that we are facing severe economic constraints as a result of energy prices. I therefore ask the Leader of the House whether we can have a debate on the economic consequences of the Energy Secretary.