If it wasn’t obvious before, recent weeks have rammed home the imperative of having our own energy and food production here in the UK. National security in an increasingly volatile world can come only from maximising our resources, yet the government chooses to do the opposite.
Sir Keir Starmer talks about acting in Britain’s national interest but is pursuing policies that force us to depend on unreliable imports for our most vital resources: energy and food.
Labour has been incredibly slow to act on North Sea gas drilling and continues to block oil drilling and fracking while recklessly buying energy from other countries. This is folly. As President Trump likes to remind us, the US has its own energy so can survive without the Strait of Hormuz being open, while Britain, under Ed Miliband’s perverse destruction of our energy assets, cannot.
We have further huge reserves of gas and oil in the North Sea and untold quantities of gas under our land that can be quickly extracted through fracking. There is no possible justification for not making the UK self-sufficient.
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Kemi Badenoch’s proposal to scrap carbon taxes is a step in the right direction. There is no point in boasting about leading the world on renewables while shipping carbon into the UK at prices demanded by others. It’s the most inefficient and anti-aspiration energy policy imaginable and we still risk being starved of the oil and gas we so obviously need, as rising prices hit families and businesses hard.
The same is true of food. We import ridiculous amounts of food that we could grow here. We grow 53 per cent of our vegetables, down from 83 per cent in 1988, and only 15 per cent of our fruit. Instead we rely on countries such as Spain, which suffer drastic crop failures and soaring energy prices, and wonder why food prices are rising and supermarket shelves at risk of emptying.
The broader response of Rachel Reeves is to heartlessly destroy family farms and businesses with a 40 per cent death tax — which was sneakily declared as a 20 per cent tax but because the tax is paid from already taxed income, the effective tax rate is double. It also assumes you have 40 per cent of the value of your business sitting around ready to pay, which of course nobody does.
Farmers face huge cost increases for fuel, fertiliser and wages, all of which are largely inflicted by government policy. As with energy, we are destroying any hope of food security as many farmers inevitably sell up or decline to plant crops.
Reeves is sacrificing key elements of our national security to make a politically vindictive attack on enterprise and wealth creation. The amount her death tax on family firms generates, which no foreign, private equity or publicly listed business has to pay, will be dwarfed by the loss of income tax and corporation tax as businesses disappear.
The combination of tax hikes and ever more restrictive employment laws will ramp up unemployment — already above 5 per cent and rising — and further erode the tax take. Labour has adopted revenge economics as a central policy, which is already damaging the nation and its security.
The world has changed. We need to be more independent and self-sufficient. We should be encouraging start-ups, not bleeding them dry of aspiration. We should be encouraging private firms to employ more staff, not lay people off because of Labour’s tax on jobs.
This government is doing its best to destroy anything or anyone who wants to be innovative and productive to secure our future in a volatile and uncertain world. Instead of punishing investors and job creators we should be encouraging them with an economy that stands on its own two feet in a nation that is secure with its own reliable energy and food resources.
Sir James Dyson is an inventor, businessman and philanthropist