Babelfish - Newspaper - Page 6
Babelfish BREAKING THE LINK
Why it’s Labour’s moral
duty to slash energy bills
TAKE 5% VAT
OFF BILLS
AND PUT IT
ON FLIGHTS
BY DALE VINCE OBE
GREEN INDUSTRIALIST
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Babelfish First Edition
BY KEVIN MAGUIRE
POLITICAL COMMENTATOR
“THE Labour Party,” Harold Wilson
famously declared, “is a moral crusade or it
is nothing.”
The state school Prime Minister was a
breath of fresh air despite his pipe smoking
in the second half of the 1960s, blowing
away the cobwebs of 13 years of Conservative
rule petering out in the staid stewardship of
Alec Douglas-Home, an Old Etonian aristo
who renounced a peerage to be installed
undemocratically in Downing Street by an
establishment magic circle.
And who in high of昀椀ce concurs with
Wilson’s statement? Why cautious Keir
Starmer. Labour’s seventh PM is a huge fan
of the third, naming Wilson as the
predecessor he most admired by picking
him out as a high-mind 昀椀gure who sought
to modernise the country.
Indeed Starmer likes to be viewed in a
similar mould, in 2021 quoting Wilson’s
celebrated dictum. “Harold Wilson once said
that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it
is nothing,” recalled Starmer. “He was right.”
So the test for Starmer is whether in
Downing Street he’s able to rediscover that
moral crusading, including giving everybody
affordable heat and light. If he does, his and
Labour’s chances of reversing plummeting
polls and prospects dramatically improve.
Delivering warm homes for everybody
should be as much a basic human right in a
civilised world as free speech and protection
against arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and
torture – yet in 2025 millions of Britons are
shivering in fuel poverty.
It’s a sin that at the same time vast pro昀椀ts
are generated by bloated energy giants,
some of them privatised, others corporate
predators from abroad, a few with feet in
both camps with the UK Labour Government
allowing them to
charge the earth by
linking prices for
cheaper renewables
such as sun and to
dirty gas.
Muslim
thirtysomething
socialist Zohran Mamdani’s inspirational
victory in New York, where he focused on
the cost of living and living standards,
highlighted an alternative in the home
town of Wall Street’s turbo capitalists.
Mamdani is a shining beacon for all those
wondering how to beat Donald Trump – and
the likes of Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch
Human cost of this
crisis is enormous
BY JONATHAN BEAN
FUEL POVERTY ACTION
and Robert Jenrick here in Britain. Values
matter – and campaigning to enhance living
standards for those struggling is a goldplated winner which is why Labour would
score by removing VAT from bills in Rachel
Reeves’ Budget instead of slashing funding
for home insulation. The short-sightedness
of leaving people in drafty properties,
requiring them to spend more on heating in
the long-run, would be another nail in the
cof昀椀n of political satire.
The anti-Green lobby is as discredited as
Brexit. These reactionaries initially denied
climate change was happening. When
people could see it was, the deniers switched
to arguing higher global temperatures
weren’t human-powered. Overwhelming
scienti昀椀c evidence knocked that one on the
head, leaving even carbon industry
propaganda tanks unable to pretend
otherwise. The Alamo of Britain’s fossil
fools is now screaming the birthplace of the
industrial revolution is too small and
irrelevant to bother reducing emissions.
Starmer can side with knuckleheads and
corporates or be a PM preaching national
renewal fully embracing renewable energy
and lowering bills to 昀椀re up living standards.
C
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Y
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