Miliband’s policies will bring wholesale deindustrialisation
By Paul Homewood
London, 19 January – Net Zero Watch has said that Labour’s green dogmatism will be a disaster for the working classes, bringing industrial closure on an unprecedented scale.
The campaign group, which has warned about the existential threat to British steel industry for more than a decade, says that the Port Talbot closure was inevitable, given the determination of all parties to push up the costs of energy.
The policy of taxing fossil fuels made the closure of Port Talbot inevitable, while the drive for renewables is pushing up electricity prices so far that the plan to replace the blast furnace with an electric-powered arc furnace will almost certainly prove to be a dead duck. [1,2]
And Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford warns that things may get even worse under a Labour government.
“Ed Miliband’s delusions over renewables are going to be a disaster for the UK working classes. He is going to produce deindustrialisation on a scale that is going make the closure of the coalmines under Margaret Thatcher look like a walk in the park.”
Mr Montford says that while the finger of blame for Port Talbot should be pointed at the Conservatives, there is an all-party consensus around the policies that produced the disaster:
“The Westminster village is so far divorced from the interests of general public that they will shrug off the Port Talbot disaster with barely a look back.”
Notes for editors
[1] Electricity prices doubled from 2002—2020, even rising during long periods of falling gas prices, as a result of increasing grid system inefficiency caused by renewables.
[2] Net Zero Watch has been warning for nearly a decade that high energy prices would destroy the sector, starting with energy-intensive industries, and in particular steel. In 2016, Net Zero Watch Director of Energy, Dr John Constable, wrote: “Tata Steel and the energy-intensive sector more broadly can be regarded as a miner’s canary, giving early warning of general economic damage as the costs of climate policies are passed through from energy to all other costs in the economy.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
No one seems to have realised the national security issues of having no raw steel manufacture in the UK. All fine when the world is peaceful………….
We have experience of this problem.
HMS Illustrious WW2
Construction was delayed by slow deliveries of her armour plates because the industry had been crippled by a lack of orders over the last 15 years as a result of the Washington Naval Treaty. As a consequence, her flight-deck armour had to be ordered from Vítkovice Mining and Iron Corporation in Czechoslovakia.
In January 1941 Illustrious was attacked by Luftwaffe Stuka dive bombers. Her armoured flightdeck withstood several bomb hits apart from one which penetrated the flightdeck. It was this Czech armour which was penetrated by the German bomb.
The Illustrious class carriers despite having a small air wing performed well in the Pacific particularly when attacked by Kamikaze aircraft. In contrast to American Essex Class. USS Franklin, Bunker Hill and Intrepid were heavily damaged whereas the Royal Navy Carriers were able to restart operations fairly quickly.
So if Illustrious had Brit steel flight deck armor, instead of that crummy Czech stuff, the bombs would not have penetrated?
” Royal Navy Carriers were able to restart operations fairly quickly.”
As others have written, the deck of a USN carrier would typically require substantial damage control and repair if heavily struck by a Kamikaze aircraft. The deck of an RN carrier might only require a sweeping down after similar.
Micky R.
I didn’t want to bore people too much.
The main delays on British carroers would be down to fires on aircraft parked on deck.
The Americans and Japanese had wooden flight decks which lead to bombs exploding in hangers.
Cirrusly? RN and US had different design criteria. American carriers carried TWICE the complement of planes than Illustrious.
“The Illustrious class carriers despite having a small air wing”
That’s why they had a small air wing.
” The main delays on British carroers would be down to fires on aircraft parked on deck.”
RN carriers were typically designed to store all aircraft below the deck, USN carriers typically stored some aircraft on deck. The Kamikaze aircraft were generally on fire, frequently without striking an Allied ship.
RN carriers were typically designed to survive sailing in the Med under hostile skies (within range of hostile land-based aircraft) , USN carriers typically designed to operate in the vastness of the ocean e.g. the Pacific, generally out of range of hostile land-based aircraft.
This thread is about the dangerously incompetent Miliband, so no more from me re: historical designs for aircraft carriers, as interesting as the OT diversion is!
If you want to fight a non-nuclear war, on any scale, against real opposition, the key is not the weapons you start with, but the ability to keep resupplying. And for that you need 1) secure energy supplies 2) secure industry, particularly heavy industry with steel production and chemical industries for explosives, and you need 3) social cohesion and a belief in your own country.
The Tories have been attacking all these for decades. There is no way the UK could sustain a fight more than a few weeks, and if we fought Russia, it could keep going indefinitely.
On BBC WATO, the presenter (name lost to memory) was interviewing a talking head about PT. Question: Do you think the the UK still needs to make steel as it’s plentiful on the market?
Lord Haw Haw would be proud.
Milibrain mentality will be a disaster for us all, not just the ‘working classes’.
Millipede brain ? Anyway in our local news: Carbon fibre , Windmills, anyone? No-oh? Oh! look at this ( more foreign money in UK ) https://www.ross-shirejournal.co.uk/news/redeployment-option-on-table-as-ross-firm-slashes-workforce-339521/ and ‘renewable energy revolution’ spin-offs from Port of Cromarty Firth as firm hailed by Trade Minister https://www.ross-shirejournal.co.uk/news/ross-shire-firm-eyes-further-growth-from-cromarty-firth-free-306109/ Taa taah!
Not just coal and steel.
Aluminium?
Glass?
Cement?
Fracking (destroyed in the womb)?
Farming in the crosshairs.
Never mind, serfs. Maybe you’ll get lucky and sell an icecream to a Davos guy sweeping past your hovel.
But the working class will all be employed in the green revolution, building windmills and setting up fields of solar farms. Nothing to worry about.
Just as bad is the current bunch of clown dumping the blast furnaces at Port Talbot.
What’s so good about:
• losing the capacity to manufacture certifiable steel – recycled scrap has no provenance to be certified for any safety critical use
• exporting 3000 jobs to the far East
• handing £500×10^6 to and Indian company for the privilege
• reversing the Industrial Revolution?
” recycled scrap has no provenance to be certified for any safety critical use”
e.g. building power stations. Although depressing to realise that the reactor pressure vessels for SXB and HPC were not manufactured in the UK.
I completely forgot to add the fourth and most important consequence of this stupidity:
• electric furnaces will add further load to the grid. As the grid’s “full up” that additional electricity can only come from dispatchable, dare I say, fossil fuel generators. The lunatics are certainly in charge of the asylum.
Ah no. The stupid polies say that the electric arc furnaces will run on renwables – or so I heard from one idiot MP.
How many windmills do they need to build to run this arc furnace?
Can they even mine, refine, manufacture, deploy and operate a wind turbine without hydrocarbon fuels? Definitely lunatics in charge! As I’ve opined elsewhere, can Pfizer create a ‘stupid’ vaccine, to which a friend replied, how about a politician vaccine. “One in the same” I said.
Laabour is no longer interested in representing the working class (which is fast disappearing thanks to insane green policies).
It hasn’t had any interest in them since Sir Tony Liar came to power, smoozing with rich people. Recall Lady Nugee – who hides by the name of Emily Thornberry – exclaiming her disgust at seeing the Cross of St George flying outside houses with white vans on the drive. Nasty, rascist, homophobic working people.
The self same Lady Nugee who sent both her children to selective schools 14 miles from her home whilst publicly stating selective schools should be banned. She makes Dianne Abbott look bright
Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher. Employment in mines peaked in 1920.
Between 1947 and 1994, some 950 mines were closed by UK governments. Clement Attlee’s Labour government closed 101 pits from 1947-‘51, Macmillan (Conservative) closed 246 pits from 1957-‘63, Wilson (Labour) and Heath (Conservative) collectively closed 253 between 1964-’76, Thatcher (Conservative) closed 115 between 1979-’90.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6498/uncategorized/the-decline-of-the-uk-coal-industry/
I used to tell my kids, when they asked “what is so good about Winston Churchill, If it was not for him we would all be speaking German.
Well what are my great grandkids going to speak, Chinese, Russian or maybe Hindi? Thanks Ed Miliband for destroying this country.
Without high quality steel you cannot make tanks, ships, railway track, skyscrapers. Using scrap steel in an arc furnace makes tin cans and white goods.
Tata are just taking the piss, as well as loads of cash out of our inept government. Nationalise them as a strategic asset, but pay them with just promises.
I presume we will be buying high grade steel, produced from a blast furnace in China or India, using exactly the same recipe, producing the same amount of carbon dioxide.
3000 people lose their jobs for the Net Zero madness and the flawed demonising of carbon dioxide.
More CO2 bringing the steel from China, but then did Nut Zero ever make any sense? And I agree that once closed the steelworks will never reopen as electricity here is too expensive. The loss of this amount of jobs in a small area will spread far beyond the direct employees.
It was Miliband who first proposed the price cap on bills that May jumped on. That has worked out well with killing competition, tax payers having to bail out the failed companies. This whole green scheme is going to cripple the economy and country. We will loose all chemical production, plastics, steelworks, cement and brickworks to be replaced by a Hydrogen factory that will be hugely expensive to produce a gas at around 70% efficiency from electricity produced by burning gas. Anything Miliband is madness.
May’s involvement and the disaster of price capping should be more widely publicised.
All that’s happened is that the cap is now what everyone charges
Net Zero is part of a wider sinister ideology scaring us into compliance. Effectively the UK is shoving its emissions overseas, along with our heavy industry, food production and more. Idiots like Miliband are commonplace in Westminster.
According to latest polls, just saying Labour are bad people is not a good election strategy.
Have Conservatives made such a mess of it that the people think anything else would be better?
Unfortunately yes! Bring on NOTA.
Even worse is their dim-witted strategy of saying a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour. No thought of giving a positive reason to vote Tory. I believe we are going to see a hung parliament as the voting won’t go with the polling. The by-elections both in England and Scotland have shown a ‘stay at home’ response from past supporters of the incumbents such that Labour have won with LESS votes than they lost with at the last GE. If you want to see the Tories become less socialist you are hardly going to achieve by saying you will vote for them or indeed doing so when the chance arose. Not picked up by the lamestream media is the Muslim effect on Labour. Choosing the morally correct stance of not surrendering to Hamas with a ceasefire has upset a lot of the Muslim Labour voters. What will they do come election day since these faux British people are more concerned about their real countries. In some cases they will stand against Labour. And we also don’t know how many Labour voters might move to Reform.
“And we also don’t know how many Labour voters might move to Reform.” You just hit the nail right on the head! Pollsters simply prostitute their “marketing” to whoever is paying for the survey.
The notion that Reform is only picking up Conservative votes could actually be completely wrong.
This will continue for any high energy use industry in the UK. And this year the majority of the population (sheep) will vote for the Tories or Labour who have globalist WEF puppets as their leaders.
As long as the people have their distractions of beer, cigarettes, sports, TV and social media they will be happy.
While Europe is closing down industry, Asia is building new power stations using coal and cheap Russian gas.
As I have said, you – UK – are unlikely to escape the properity-decadence-collapse cycle. You are in late decadence, and there is no sign you will stop.
When I was working – nearly 20 years ago now – we had a scare at several refineries where pipe flanges of Chinese origin had been installed. They came with all the required paperwork to “prove” they were the correct grade of steel with the correct heat treatment etc- but they were very brittle, therefore completely useless, and could have caused catastrophic failure if not identified and replaced. Millibrain would not understand that virgin steel is a completely different animal from recycled scrap.
Jun 26, 2022
#1 Cemex closed the South Ferriby cement works
even though the quarry has plenty of material
#2 Now 10 miles away in Hull someone just built a huge silo tower
to contain cement that will be now IMPORTED
ie CO2 footprint of cement UK uses, has increased
.. https://twitter.com/MeehanMedia/status/1535258945245351936
More BBC nonsense
Weather history: Frost fairs in the Little Ice Age
The best is saved till the end
Could there be another ice age?
It seems most unlikely that this could happen again – 2023 was the warmest year on record and this year could be even hotter globally.
Our planet continues to warm at an alarming rate, with temperatures around 1.5C higher since the industrial revolution.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/67964531
They use a decimal point to show they have a sense of humour.
BBC says ” Could there be another ice age? It seems most unlikely that this could happen again ” (as already highlighted by glenartney).
The BBC appears to have no grasp of the immense changes that can happen to weather and climate over the millennia, irrespective of mankind’s activities.
I shall – ever after – refer those who say that with a panicky look – to Richard Lindzen’s comment – can’t we adjust to a temp change that’s similar to the difference between breakfast and lunch?