£224BILLION
That’s the staggering sum Labour plans to borrow to turn our economy green
‘Writing cheques they can’t cash’
AN astonishing quarter of a trillion pounds will be borrowed by a Labour government to help fight climate change, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said yesterday.
In her keynote speech to Labour’s conference, Miss Reeves said she hoped to be Britain’s first ‘green chancellor’.
She said Labour would borrow an extra £28billion a year between now and the end of the decade to help pay for the ‘transition’ to a green economy – a total of £224billion.
The spending is roughly four times the Government’s current green spending pledge.
Miss Reeves said the cash will help pay for the ‘green industries of the future’. She said this included ‘giga-factories to build batteries for electric vehicles; a thriving hydrogen industry; offshore wind with turbines made in Britain; planting trees and building flood defences; keeping homes warm and getting energy bills down; good new jobs in communities throughout Britain’.
Miss Reeves said the spending will help strengthen the economy and ‘protect our planet for future generations’.
However, it was at odds with the rest of her speech – which focused heavily on trying to reassure voters that the profligacy of the Jeremy Corbyn years was over.
She said Labour would impose a ‘laser-like’ focus on getting value for money – and pledged to go after private firms that fleeced the taxpayer during the Covid crisis.
Miss Reeves said Labour would no longer be ‘making promises we can’t keep or commitments we can’t pay for’.
She added: ‘We would put in place fiscal rules that will bind the next Labour government to ensure we always spend wisely and keep debt under control.’
But a senior Tory source said the commitment on green investment was the latest in a series of uncosted pledges.
The source pointed out that Miss Reeves was pledging to ‘scrap’ business rates without saying how the £25billion annual revenue would be replaced, as well as calling for a string of other spending commitments – such as maintaining the Universal Credit top-up – at a cost of £6billion a year. ‘This is the same old Labour writing cheques they just can’t cash,’ the source said.
Earlier, Miss Reeves moved to toughen the party’s stance on Brexit. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour no longer supported the restoration of free movement with the EU, despite Sir Keir Starmer previously pledging to fight for it during his leadership campaign.
‘People have voted to leave the EU,’ she said. ‘We have moved on. We are not going to bring back free movement under a Labour government.’
Miss Reeves also ditched Sir Keir’s pledge to nationalise the big energy firms, saying Labour would take a ‘pragmatic approach’.
LIKE sailors adrift on the high seas scanning the horizon for land, political aficionados have spent 18 months looking in vain for Labour policies.
Now, finally, a tantalising glimpse of Sir Keir Starmer’s vision for Britain. And lo, despite promising to end the profligacy of the Corbyn era, it mirrors the Marxist’s class-envy blueprint for bankruptcy.
True, the Mail welcomes moves to scrap suffocating business rates to boost struggling high streets, funded by hitting online giants with a tech tax.
But we recoil at the rest of the programme: Clobbering private schools, hiking the top rate of income tax, hammering pensions and borrowing stomach-churning sums to tackle climate change.
Labour says it will soak the casually demonised bankers and billionaires to foot the bill. But it will surely be ordinary families hit in the pocket after the job and wealth creators catch the first flight out of Britain.
Truly, the more things change, the more this pitiful party stays the same.