Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)

My Lord, I congratulate my noble and homonymous friend on his new position, which I am sure he will occupy with distinction. The Minister asked a question about dirty energy and how could we possibly promote it. In fact, the truth is the reverse. The Minister is promoting dirty energy. Having deindustrialised this country with impossibly expensive energy, we now buy our steel, our goods and even the solar panels for this renewable energy from China, which makes them using power from energy generation stations fuelled with coal, of which they build one per week. The dirt is going up into the atmosphere and, amazingly, it travels around the world. It does not just hang over China. That is where the dirt is. It is a complete mistake to believe that this side is against clean energy; we are just for sensible energy. I noticed also that the Minister did not reply to my noble friend’s remark about intermittency and the fact that, right now, we have quite a lot of offshore wind, but it is not being used much because the wind ain’t blowing. Does he think that these new contracts for difference will make any difference to the wind as it decides whether to blow or not? I do not believe so. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Russell, that we can lead the world. We are leading the world in high electricity prices right now. Regardless of whether we have offshore wind, we will need gas, as the noble Lord implied earlier, and we are closing down our gas; we are refusing to build new gas wells in the North Sea. So, what are we doing? We are buying it from the North Sea from Norway. It was announced today that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, its $2 trillion oil fund, has embarked on a major sell-off of its holdings in London-listed small-cap and mid-cap companies, even as Rachel Reeves hails a new golden age for the City, blah blah. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, “In the bad old days nobody played the game; it is great that now they are playing the game”. Can the Minister confirm that the private equity houses, which are the major financiers of these contracts, agreed this very high price, which will further ruin our economy, only if they got 20 years? Is that why the noble Baroness is able to rejoice that somebody is playing the game now, because they got 20 years in which our economy will be ruined?