Alastair McQuillan (Rutland & Melton Green Party Parliamentary Candidate in 2015, 2017 and 2019) writes in the Melton Times
“Whatever our views of the monarchy we can all recognise the significance
of the events of the past two weeks, the passing of a monarch who has
been a constant presence for most of the British people. Beyond the
recognition of the Queen’s 70 years of public service, at the centre of
all the pageantry is a family that has lost a loved one – an experience
we will all endure at some point in our lives.
The death of the queen has meant that the broader economic and political
issues that the country faces have been pushed to one side for the past
fortnight, but they are still there.
Tomorrow will see an emergency budget, and highlight the full horror of
the situation the county faces. Borrowing £150bn just to cap energy
bills at already historic levels – to give most of it to oil and gas
companies – is just the start of the pain.
The emergency we face as a country this winter is not simply a product
of high prices but of a failure of successive Conservative governments
willfully dismissing policies that would have reduced or demand on gas in
the first place.
Take home insulation, adopting the Green Party’s policies for home
insulation over the past decade would have seen us lose the title of the
least insulated nation in Western Europe. Delivered via direct grants
for low-income households and support to businesses, adopting these
policies would have cost less than £5bn and returned benefits year on
year. Yet still, even now under Conservative plans, it will take 700
years to upgrade Britain’s homes for low-carbon heating.
Successive governments have also ignored the benefits of cheap renewable
energy. It is not new that wind and solar power are cheap, this was the
case in 2015 when David Cameron decided to ‘cut the green crap’. But now
the figures are staggering, building a new solar or wind farm is now 9
times cheaper than just running an equivalent gas power station.
There is a thread that ties all of these stories together: the power of
vested interests. Instead of reducing our energy consumption through
insulation, and servicing our needs with cheap, domestic renewables
running on the sun and the wind, British energy policies have sought to
secure the profits of companies. These energy companies have no interest
in realising a truly modern, clean and reliable energy system we could
all depend on.”
