By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
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Reaching Labour’s target for decarbonising the economy will cost “hundreds of billions” of pounds, a shadow minister has disclosed in a recording obtained by The Telegraph.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the £28 billion per year originally allocated to Labour’s green investment plan was a “tiny” amount.
He said the fact that Sir Keir Starmer had downgraded his investment plans from £28 billion to £4.7 billion “made it sound as if we basically junked the whole thing but we definitely haven’t”.
Mr Jones told a public meeting in Bristol that private capital would have to be used to upgrade infrastructure, but “public subsidy” would still be needed alongside that.
His comments are set to reignite the row over Labour’s spending plans.
On Wednesday night, Rishi Sunak challenged Sir Keir about the revelation, saying during a debate on the BBC: “Just be straight with people, how many hundreds is it. Is it 200, is it 300, is it 400?”
Sir Keir, the Labour leader, appeared to argue that some of the money would be invested by the private sector rather than just the public sector.
Mr Jones was asked about Labour’s green investment plan during a meeting held in a cinema on March 14, the month after Sir Keir dropped his proposal for a £28 billion-a-year green industrial revolution.
He told the meeting that the £28 billion figure “became a distraction against the mission of decarbonising the power system by 2030” and that “it wasn’t really defined well enough in the first place, so we probably shouldn’t have announced it in the way we did”.
Mr Jones told an audience member who spoke to him at the end of the meeting that decarbonising the power system “is still one of the top five priorities and it is going to be a huge amount of effort to get there because we’ll have to move quite quickly.
“But a lot of the coverage in the news was about that specific 28 [billion pounds], which because journalists saw conflict made it sound as if we basically junked the whole thing but we definitely haven’t.”
When an audience member said some people would say that £28 billion a year was not enough to decarbonise the economy, Mr Jones replied: “No, it’s tiny. Hundreds of billions of pounds we need.”
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Starmer’s claim that some of the money will be invested by the private sector is utter irrelevant. Whether it is government or private money, it will still have to be paid for ultimately by the public.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 27, 2024 at 03:42AM
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