Eco-reparations folly would cost us dear

ED Miliband’s demand for Britain to pay reparations to poor countries suffering the effects of global warming are as absurd as his Climate Change act was disastrous.

That legislation – passed with reckless insouciance when he was Labour’s energy secretary in 2008 – was the most ruinous commitment in our peacetime history.

It put the country on the slippery slope to net zero carbon by 2050, although how this target can be achieved without crashing the economy is anyone’s guess.

His plan for a Labour government to pay untold billions to foreign nations for ‘loss and damage’ linked to historical Western emissions is equally hare-brained.

The idea of sending vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to flood-hit Pakistan (to use his example) is staggering. It has, after all, got a nuclear weapons programme.

How would compensation be calculated? How could one guarantee the reparations would fund genuinely green policies – and not end up lining the pockets of dictators?

and what about the flip-side of the coin? Thanks to the success of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the whole world has enjoyed a once unimaginable leap in life expectancy and living standards.

Mr Miliband – a dismal flop as Labour leader – may come across as a harmless policy geek. Really, he’s a dangerous ecozealot. at the BBC he is deified as some kind of climate seer. But that’s because he shares the broadcaster’s apocalyptic environmental groupthink.

Labour vehemently insists that reparation payments are not party policy. But isn’t the plain truth that in his green fervour, Mr Miliband has let the cat out of the bag?