Levelling Up Secretary Greg Clark has announced an effective takeover of all financial, governance and recruitment powers of the Labour-run Liverpool City Council, after a new report revealed yet more “serious shortcomings” in the council’s money management and leadership. The Council’s already been under special measures since March 2021, when Robert Jenrick appointed four commissioners to control regeneration, highways, and housing. The hope was they’d stick around for three years to rebuild the council after its “breakdown“. It turns out the situation is so bad they now need a fifth commissioner to handle finances…
Clark also revealed in a letter to local councillors that Steve Rotheram, Liverpool’s Metro Mayor, will chair an “advisory panel” to “plan for Liverpool’s revival“:
“I am determined to help do everything I can to help Liverpool come out of the current intervention stronger and able to achieve its ambitions. The commissioners’ report shows that there are still serious shortcomings that need to be sorted out, especially in financial management […] So following talks I had in person in Liverpool with Mayor Joanne Anderson and Mayor Steve Rotheram in recent weeks, I am appointing a new panel, chaired by that same Mayor Rotheram and supported by some of the wisest, and most experienced people in city leadership, to lead this transition from current interventions to a successful future.”
The biggest Whitehall takeover of local government in history…
When Greg Clark asked Huawei representatives before his Science and Technology committee meeting today whether they were free to express their views, the answer was “very much so”. Chairman Clark then proceeded with the obvious follow up: “what’s your view of the new security law in Hong Kong”. Surprisingly, none of them then felt able to express a view:
Jeremy Thompson (Vice President Huawei UK): “I don’t think it would be consistent with my role with Huawei in this forum [to make a statement]”
Victor Zhang (Vice President and Chief Representative Huawei UK): “As a company we are not in a position to comment on that political agenda… I can [comment] but not at this hearing.”
Yao Wenbing (Vice President Business Developments and Partnerships): “I don’t think my personal view is of interest here to this public hearing.”
Free to say anything they like…
Funnily enough certain backbenchers haven’t taken up their places to watch Boris’s inaugural speech at the Despatch Box…
Not content with just banning porn and plastic straws, Theresa May has decided to add a £1 trillion – that’s £1,000,000,000,000 – economic black hole to her “legacy” with her new policy to force the UK to have ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. Philip Hammond has already warned that the cost “is likely to be well in excess of a trillion pounds”. Blows the row over tax cuts into insignificance…
The problem is that no-one has any idea how much it is actually going to cost. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), chaired by scandal-ridden Lord Deben, has put out a figure of £50 billion every year. BEIS’ preliminary estimate puts the cost a full 40% higher at £70 billion per year – these are just back of the envelope calculations. The Treasury wants to do a formal review of the costs but this will take months, not days. The fact that an outgoing Prime Minister is trying to bind the country with a commitment this vast without even doing a proper costing first is the height of irresponsibility…
Worse, a huge proportion of the costs won’t fall on the Treasury itself but directly on ordinary people. The plan laid out by the CCC relies heavily on expensive changes in consumer behaviour. Energy bills will rise, drivers will be expected to switch to more expensive green cars. This is fine for people like John Gummer who’ve had their snouts in the trough for years. For a pensioner struggling to get through the winter or someone who depends on a van to run their small business, these changes will be very costly indeed…
Businesses will also bear a huge part of the cost – it will effectively spell the death knell for serious manufacturing in the UK. Businesses will simply move their factories, emissions – and jobs – overseas at an even greater rate. May’s Government has already done a great job helping to drive car manufacturing out of the country with their ban on new petrol cars from 2040. May’s latest genius idea should finish the job…
Whitehall insiders are laying the blame squarely at the door of May and her dour Business Secretary Greg Clark, who have been gripped with a desperate desire to rush through something to give them some semblance of a legacy in their last six weeks in office. If May wants to leave a responsible legacy behind for her successor, she won’t lumber them with one of the most costly and damaging policies in the history of the UK…
The Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy this month released its proposals for “a UK Emissions Trading System” after Brexit. Currently the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme covers over 1,000 installations in UK, including steel, cement, and power stations – meaning the number of credits issued and withdrawn by the EU Commission goes a long way to determine the price of energy and construction in the UK. Brexiteers would be forgiven for thinking that by leaving we would take back control of our own energy pricing…
Uber-Remainer Greg Clarke has had other ideas. His BEIS department has proposed that a UK Scheme should ‘link’ to the EU system, pegging it to the EU price and therefore giving the EU Commission power to raise household energy and construction prices in the UK even after we’ve left. What a joke…
Greg Clark was busy launching the Climate Change Committee’s new report this morning calling for a legally-binding target of zero net emissions by 2050. In the BBC’s view there’s just “one controversial recommendation” in the report: to turn down thermostats to 19C in winter – literally a matter of life and death for some elderly people trying to get through winter. Why is Greg Clark trying to kill off Tory voters?
Clark was also particularly effusive about the Committee’s chair, John Gummer/Lord Deben, opening his speech with:
“Everyone knows that when you appoint John Gummer to chair this important committee you are going to get rigour, you are going to get passion, and you are going to be challenged.”
What Clarke also knows is that when you appoint John Gummer, you get conflicts of interest worth over £600,000 with his family business, Sancroft International, raking in hundreds of thousands from “green” companies. Companies that Gummer’s own Committee lobbies the Government to hand billions of pounds of subsidies to.
Somehow Clark forgot to mention this, but that’s really no surprise as it’s just the latest in a long line of his BEIS Department whitewashing the whole affair. Whatever the pros and cons of renewable energy itself, the deeply corrupt industry that has sprung up to shuffle taxpayer subsidies from one gravy train to the next is a scandal of global proportions…
