Solar farms or actual farms - What's more important?

"No race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." - Booker T. Washington

As you breach the top of the hill on the Thanet Way heading back to London from having spent more money that you expected on oysters and olives in the Kent town of Whitstable, you are greeted by the tapestry of wetland, scored with dykes and sheep paths, wooden fences and stone walls behind the sea defences and mudflats of the estuary known as Graveney marsh. It’s a rare piece of remoteness from the congested south east of England, where Redshanks and Lapwings share the sky with gulls and Oyster Catchers. It’s here that a huge solar farm threatens to destroy all that is beautiful beneath the sky. The irony of course that if sea levels are rising as the doom mongers say, requiring non-Co2 emitting energy production, the first casualty would be a solar farm at sea level. Something at risk from what it purports to defend against is exactly the sort of muddied plans dropped in a puddle thinking of our new overlords, the Net Zero Labour party. Despite development consent having been granted in 2020, it’s unclear if this monstrosity is going ahead, but elsewhere they certainly are.

Not that you’d necessarily know it. There's so much news right now that articles on EU plastic bottle tops designed to make your drink dribble down your jumper jostle for position alongside World War 3 being closer than we think. And that’s before we even get to the Labour party with the sort of majority more familiar to Stalin with just 20.15% of the electorate supporting them from the second lowest turnout in a general election since 1922. As one of the few countries in Europe voting for power hungry Statism, the UK is about to be more clobbered than whack-a-mole, particularly by a crazed-looking Ed Milliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Having Net Zero and Energy Security in the same job title is like selling toasters while banning bread. Miliband is the high priest of climate emergency who thinks it’s wise to blanket the beauty of our countryside and farmland with bird-slaughtering wind turbines and giant mirrors.

If Starmer is apparently ruling unencumbered by ideology or doctrine, but it’s hard to imagine what things might look like if he was; in fact it appears suspiciously as though he’s lying. Our new overlords are ploughing into the fabric of the UK with a commitment last seen in Nathan's hot dog eating contest competitors. Starmer’s claim of no doctrine is certainly is at odds with his 2024 Manifesto declaring a mission-driven Government. A mission-driven government is the sort of thing that should be pulled over on the motorway and quarantined until it sobers up.

The new government is one which considers the State as at the centre of the country’s life. From finding school discipline too oppressive, to saddling small businesses with destructive DEI policy. It’s hard to see how social mobility can occur when children are allowed to disrupt classes like a National Lampoon’s outtake and are introduced to a world in which their actions do not result in consequences. This is of course something the real world will introduce them to pretty rapidly outside the school gates regardless as to which government is in power.

Ed Miliband is the most dangerous of all. He’ll still be jabbering ‘a clean energy superpower’ on his death bed, long after his disastrous energy plans have been resigned to non-recyclebale landfill. During their campaign, if anyone could bear to listen, Starmer and Miliband, repeatedly said their controversial plan to decarbonise UK electricity by 2030 would reduce household bills by £300. With exposure to gas prices and relying upon the fickleness of the weather for energy production, Labour can’t actually exercise any control over prices, so, this has now been downgraded to ‘might’ reduce household bills. There’s a lot of heartache between I will marry you and I might.

The fact is that Labour are less interested in reducing household bills and more interested in throwing the wealth of the nation into the sacrificial volcano of Net Zero. This is at the cost of productive farmland, bucolic beauty, as well as to the taxpayer. Recent calculations (Turver) show that through subsidies and indirect costs, renewables add over £12 billion to energy bills each year, a figure which has yet to be contested by the green lobby.

It’s hard to squeeze into a lift this days without brushing against an expert in one field claiming knowledge in another. Richard Horton, the Editor the Lancet has claimed that “the climate emergency that we are facing today is the most important existential crisis facing the human species”. He sounds like a man who’s done one too many Gen. Z school runs. I look forward to car mechanics claiming knowledge in seismology, but I won’t be holding my breath. For some reason it’s only middle class white collars who can claim additional knowledge outside their speciality, the working class need to stay in their lane; something car mechanics certainly do know about. If we are heading to global environmental catastrophe then there’s nothing the UK can do about it, producing as it does 1% of global emissions. Since its Climate Act, the UK’s Co2 has halved, while China’s have doubled. In tennis terms the UK has tied a hand behind it’s back, while China has nailed the backhand overhead smash. If Britain is trying to lead by example then it’s just fallen into a canal with its hands tied shouting ‘copy this’.

Seemingly, the best way to appease the Net Zero gods is to destroy an arable country with solar panels. Labour promise to double onshore wind, triple solar and quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030. This shares the sinister tone of someone threatening to vandalise the Chelsea flower show because it’s too bourgeois. The one thing these renewables have in common, other than the large carbon footprint in manufacture, is that that weather reliability for them to produce electricity is not included.

Miliband, inspired by Stalin, has ignored the recommendations of the Planning Inspectorate, and local democracy in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk by granting consent to huge solar parks - notice the implication that ‘park’ suggests it might be scenic, with a car park, visitors centre and dog water bowls - that will swallow thousands of fertile acres in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, with two more giant solar ‘parks’ in Lincolnshire also approved. In response to this Lincolnshire Councillor Colin Davie, said “these enormous infrastructure projects should not be dumped in our county… Our agricultural land should be protected and it plays a key role in our nation’s food security. But these pleas are not being heard by the Labour government now in charge of environmental policy.”

Miliband is driven by doctrine that justifies replacing cheap and reliable gas power stations with ludicrously-expensive and often useless wind turbines and solar farms, while asphyxiating British companies with the world’s highest energy prices. He’s evidently missed a sentence in the IPCC’s 2021 report Human Influence on Modes of Climate Variability: ‘we have to admit that sub-sea and atmospheric volcanic activity might be as significant as carbon dioxide in causing some of the recent warming.’ Read that without feeling your blood pressure rise at a government hellbent on the pursuit of devastating policies on farmland based upon paper thin arguments.

Miliband said that the £8.3 billion investment in GB Energy is vital to meet the “huge challenges” the country faces, including the climate crisis, which was “not a future threat but a present reality”. The only huge challenge facing the UK is a Labour Government riding roughshod over planning laws and bound to doctrine that the rest of the world is increasingly ignoring. The huge challenge eluding Miliband is getting his head around the fact that ‘the’ science is never settled, and that the junk temperature readings of the Met Office might as well be in saunas or jet runways (which many are), and that plenty of research is showing increased CO2 follows global warming rather than drives it.

After all, a truly green revolution would be embracing nuclear power, the safest energy by far and with no CO2 emissions, which is their priority. Reducing CO2 emissions is more important to Labour than low energy bills, reliable energy, farmland, scenery and birdlife, so the reluctance to embrace nuclear is glaring. They might cite one of the three nuclear disasters, but the only one of any significance was Chernobyl, which was apparently built from cardboard and modelled upon a blurred aerial photo of Western plants; and with a button that should never have been pressed, but was. Instead the UK has only five currently operational nuclear power stations, two will be retired by 2026, and two more by 2028. Hinkley Point C is the only reactor site under development and will not come online until 2031 Between 2028 and 2031, Britain will have just one operational nuclear power station.

Replacing reliance upon fossil fuels for energy to the weather is something any farmer would shake the head at; if they could rely upon something more reliable than the weather they would doubtlessly leap at it, although it’s not as if farmers are being listened to.

Milliband considers himself to have a mandate, which 80% of the population did not vote for. It reveals an arrogant disregard for anything but his own cult mission. If a bus tour visited places voted for by 20% of passengers they’d be a riot. Reducing UK CO2 emissions to zero at the cost of pretty much everything, including energy reliability and godly pleasures once available to everyone, such as a rolling views of picturesque and arable fields now industrialised in the spirit of Blake’s dark satanic mills, is an act of violence upon out fabric of life. At what point does the ‘it’s just incompetence’ argument stop and the realisation that the polices designed to kick the scaffold from beneath the country’s feet are looking increasingly deliberate?