by Will Jones
Ed Miliband has ordered an immediate ban on new drilling in the North Sea – overruling his own officials and risking triggering a wave of legal action. The Telegraph has more.
In an unusual intervention into what is typically an apolitical process, the Energy Secretary has told regulators not to approve a new round of drilling that was slated for confirmation in the coming weeks.
His decision to block the licences means that companies will have wasted millions of pounds on preparing their bids, with experts warning they are likely to take legal action as a result.
The decision followed crisis meetings yesterday between Mr. Miliband and his aides after the Telegraph asked for updates on outstanding drilling licence applications.
The applications, from companies seeking to exploit up to 35 new North Sea areas, were submitted as part of the 33rd offshore oil and gas licensing round initiated by the last Government in autumn 2023.
It saw 76 oil and gas companies submitting 115 bids to drill for oil and gas across 257 “blocks” of the North Sea, Irish Sea and East Atlantic. The NSTA said these would boost U.K. oil output by 600 million barrels.
Bids for up to 35 areas were still awaiting a decision from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator, when the election was called.
On Wednesday afternoon the NSTA said that applications were still being considered, despite the change in Government. A spokesman reiterated the NSTA’s pre-election statement that: “Further consideration is being given to a small number of remaining applications and a few more may be offered at a later date.”
However, Mr. Miliband subsequently instructed the NSTA to block them all.
In a terse statement issued late on Wednesday, his spokesman said: “We will not issue new licences to explore new fields, and will not revoke existing oil and gas licences. We will manage existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan.”
Worth reading in full.
Completely insane. The world – and the U.K. – is going to need oil and gas for a long while yet, even under our crazy Net Zero plans. But it appears the U.K. is going to miss out on producing it. Because who needs industry? Who needs income? Who needs affordable energy, for that matter? Not Britain it seems, at least according to Labour. Though somehow I don’t think the public is going to agree.
The public will agree only when the pain of those decisions becomes abundantly obvious, and perhaps not even then.
In the meantime, I’m OK with this. The more they restrict drilling the more a barrel of oil costs. My investment portfolio looks awesome.
All those people who voted for that clown, gave him a landslide, will be having second thoughts when the bills come due for increased offshore wind at 15 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies that reduced the wholesale price from 30 c/kWh.
plus increased reinforcement and expansion of on land grids, plus the traditional generators having to vary more of their output to counteract the up/down output of wind, on a minute by minute basis, 24/7/365.
Those items will add another 4 c/kWh to user monthly bills
The UK will be even less competitive in world markets
Standards of living will decrease even more
The UK will be even more of an economic basket case
The lapdog media will be told to blame Putin
Ukraine will get more weapons and money
The UK people will be even more screwed than before.
Wilpost, very few people actually voted for the Labour Party with its 172 seat majority.
The turnout was less than 60% across the nation and only 20.4% of the total electorate actually voted for Starmer’s Labour Party.
It is the least votes for the greatest majority in British electoral history.
No matter, the asylum has been taken over by the inmates now, so for the next few years expect bedlam and chaos to be delivered.
Are the parliamentarians not in the Labour Party all emasculated? Seems that way.
Even John Curtice acknowledges that the first-past-the-post voting system is failing democracy. (i newspaper 8 July)
Note this comment will mean something to us in GB not necessarily elsewhere.
The best we can hope for is that Labour do well in government and turn round what has been 14 years of chaos.
The reality is though, they won’t deal with immigration, they won’t deal with the NHS, they won’t deal with DEI etc. and Labour have never been able to deal with the economy.
This O&G ‘ban’ will run and run. It’s a bit of Beaker showmanship to demonstrate he’s a decisive politician. The fact is he was a disaster as leader and he’ll be a disaster again. But what do you expect when he stabbed his own brother in the back to become leader?
Labour will get the socialists all exited over the coming months and then it’ll go downhill rapidly. The principle challenge over the next 3 years or so will be geopolitical and the best Labour can field is David Lammy, a race baiter who called Trump a Nazi and a psychopath.
I give Starmer 3 years and won’t be surprised if there’s an early election.
They will fragment split and be derided by the very people who elected them.
This isn’t a government, its flies in the honey pot
The UK people have to look forward to at least three more years of additional screwings, plus they have to pay for the next cabal of idiots to clean up the mess of the prior cabals.
Can you imagine another dysfunctional Johnson as Prime Minister?
As I said, the UK people will be screwed for decades.
Why is there no exodus to escape such chaotic tyranny?
In the US, we got lucky. Trump will win by a landslide and wipe out a lot of woke, idiot Democrats, who are scared s..t
It is not a lock for Trump. There are multiple ways for the “progressives” to cheat. The only way to overcome the 20 million illegal voters (who will have their ballots harvested and filled in) and the mindless drone Democrats, is to make sure everyone you know to vote. we have to swamp the system with Republican votes even if that means getting RINOs.
FJB
Doesn’t he know that a substantial fraction of oil is used by the petrochemical industries
for the manufacture many thousands of materials ranging from road tar to plastics, synthetic fibers and drugs?
I can’t wait for winter to come. Hopefully, Mother Nature will slape some sense into him.
No chance of that. First, the cancellation of the drilling licenses would only impact supply years in the future, though knowledge of that future supply would restrain the futures market a bit.
Second, left wing nut jobs don’t care about the average person and what they have to go through just to survive.
Third, left wing nut jobs with money and power will never feel the impact of their ignorance-based decisions, well, at least, not until the torches and pitchforks show up at their door.
The ‘torches and pitchforks’ folks have all died off. Hope springs eternal, but the warriors have left.
Only thing Miliband knows is his fathers copy of ‘Das Kapital’.
Well we can hope he oversteps the mark…
I doubt it. Net Zero is an attack on the standard of living of the working classes. Therefore proponents of Net Zero are the enemy of the people. The clown clearly has not taken any notice of what Marx and Engels say about the ultimate fate of enemies of the people.
Marxism today is not, and maybe never was, about emancipating the People. It was always just a ruse to get them to change their slavemasters to even worse ones.
Marxism Today…
Is now known as Spiked
I think he has been taking Biden lessons.
I did like this fine speech by the new broom Chancellor who almost sounded like an old school just roll up yer sleeves and get things done and we’ll get those shovels in the ground happening-
Rachel Reeves makes first speech as UK chancellor – watch live (youtube.com)
Until you realize she really means riding roughshod over any objections to more fickle energy factories and their transmission lines. As for getting all the housing and biz rocking and rolling with top down edicts well naturally that explains the need for another 300 uncosted planning officers added to the bureaucracy. Something does not compute when you’d expect wanting to become a planning officer is a bad career move. Yes Minister.
A good article from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/13/rachel-reeves-growth-economy-labour/
Would be nice if the lamestream media had asked about the 300 new planners she’s promised and what they’s costed to add them to the bureaucracy but crickets. My bet is they hadn’t done the sums given how she was bragging about how quick they were all cutting through with the shovelling.
and the creation of a National Wealth Fund that has so little money it will make no difference to anything
That’s code for snafuing any spare super fund money or allocation floating about the place for ‘nation building/planet saving good works’.
A fan of Joe Biden?
Birds of a feather. Their first move in office is a enormously stupid one. Biden stopped the pipeline and Miliband stops the new drilling.
The recently elected extreme leftists have decided that the ouster of the Conservative Party is a mandate for them to accelerate the destruction of the United Kingdom with their lunatic policies. Conservative was awful because it was really just Leftist Light, not conservative in any meaningful way, and it was the lesser evil. Brits will soon find out how much worse it can get.
The Tories were following Nut Zero and tellingly only got a boost in the polls after Sunak announced putting the ban on ICE cars by 5 years (but kept the fines for selling ICE). Labour only got in by not being the Tories and now are guaranteed a single term only by accelerating Nut Zero. That gives 5 years for a proper alternative to organise and be ready to reverse the self destruction, get a move on Nigel.
That will be the first test for the incoming Labour Gummint-
Stellantis could shut UK plants over electric car rules (bbc.com)
EV Curse: Lexus, Porsche and Mercedes all STRUGGLING to sell EVs | MGUY Australia (youtube.com)
It’s either blink on saving the planet with your on the nose EVs or your union car mates get it lefties. You choose cos the deplorables aint.
Typical of the climate movement. Advocacy (in this case implementation) of measures “because climate” which will have no effect on either global emissions or climate. All that will happen in this case is that the oil and gas will be imported. And even were it to lower UK oil and gas consumption, that would be too small a global effect to be measurable.
The usual accompaniment to this is a belief in other impossible policies, and it is in Miliband’s case. Like the idea that by 2030 the UK can move to net zero in power generation by using wind and solar. The idea that at the same time the country can move to EVs and heat pumps to replace ICE cars and gas boilers. Miliband seems to believe these too, along with our own resident multi-account trolls.
Its a sign of a cult when a set of unrelated irrational dogmas are unquestioningly adhered to, so you always find people buying in to all of them. Suppose there is a climate crisis. This doesn’t make wind power any more plausible. But you always find that the beliefs go together, climate crisis, wind & solar, EV’s, heat pumps.
The usual reason for this, and it seems to be the case with climate, is that the policies are wanted in themselves for quite other reasons. Climate is then used as a justification for them.
Something similar has happened with the trans movement… but that’s another story for another day.
I’ll bet that Millipede believes he can fly, as well!
Welcome to B-Ed-lam
Ideology trumps reality
The people? Ugh
An “utterly appalled” Tory MP has accused Ed Miliband of approving a solar farm project while having “complete disregard for community consent”.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1922575/ed-miliband-energy-solar-alicia-kearns
Some red tape cutting is more equal than others just like the Chancellor said and so the pissing off voters begins 😉
Hey, you have to look past the obvious.
This is Labour’s joined up thinking at its finest. They have promised to control immigration which is running at over one million, yes one million/year here in the UK. The net figure for migration is given as 730,000 in 2022 and 680,000 in 2023. That is, the best guess for how many people left the country is set at about 500,000 during each of those years. Data is notionally kept by the ONS.
Now what Ed the Gravestone….sorry I mean Miliband, sorry, has concluded is, if he destroys the economy completely then the number of migrants wanting to enter the dystopian world he has created, will reduce to a mere trickle. Maybe even down to the few tens of thousands it was meant to be under the last Tory government’s manifesto promise. Interestingly, back to the figures it was at it’s highest yearly intake during the last century BB as in Before Blair.
Clever coves these Labour ministers don’t you know?
More onshore wildlife destroying windmills anyone?
Ed hasn’t a clue what he is letting himself in for. There is strong local objection to new electricity pylons across much of rural Britain – not much use to a wind farm if you can’t connect it to the grid.
The error is in giving a regulatory body this power. This should not fall within their purview.
Meanwhile….
Guido hears a memo was sent round to [paliamentary] staff instructing them to ‘stop asking Nigel for selfies’ as they aren’t supposed to show partiality toward MPs or parties. The Reform Leader already charming his way through the ranks….
https://order-order.com/2024/07/10/house-of-commons-staff-told-to-stop-asking-nigel-for-selfies/
Now watch the inflation markers.
The renewable answer to Europe’s fossil-fuel inflation
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-renewable-answer-to-europes-fossil-fuel-inflation
Renewables are what CAUSED all the massive inflation in the first place.
The more you add, the more expensive and erratic the electricity supply becomes.
Messing with the costs associated with energy is what caused much of recent US inflation. We followed UK/EU energy policies and how did that work out as measured by inflation?
Sorry, response was meant for MyUsername.
The EU can do as it pleases
So when will Britain join the EU again? Exit Brexit so to say.
Never – before you can elect the executive
Lusername reads communist pap and propaganda, no surprise.
Oh no, it has the word social in it. Scary.
And yet you are totally anti-society….. Go figure.
It is you that is SCARED of a free society. !
If Germany had all its nuclear plants still running, as well as it coal plant, they could still be an industrial giant.
As Trump correctly stated.. relying on Russian gas was rank stupidity
It is the idiotic adoption of renewables that is totally responsible for their current energy problems and prices..
So let me get this straight. A bunch of commie leftists up to their usual modus operandi meant decent folk had to cut off their funding supply to try and get them to stop with the usual. That reduced fossil fuel supply to decent folk and caused energy inflation particularly hard on struggletown which is exactly what dumb leftists in decent countries want to do anyway.
Sadly the UK electoral system is so poor that it allows these crazy outcomes but never reflects the subtle undertones which would make democracy so much more a player in elections. Basically the Tories were rubbish and couldn’t even be bothered to give their usual voters a reason to vote for them. Do them good if they are forever banished to obscurity. Meanwhile Labour were much, much worse than the Government when in opposition but, unfortunately, the UK doesn’t have a law against that. Starmer cannot shut Miliband up unless he knows better and it is obvious he doesn’t. Not a brain in the House it would seem. .
The UK is already shipping water and we now have a load of inexperienced new members on the Government benches – what could possibly go wrong?
Starmer can sack his Secretary of State…
…hardly does it justice. We Brexited with no plan; we’re on the back side of the demographic curve; capital is draining away to New York; we’re going to nationalize all our worst businesses instead of letting them go bust, and now we’re committing to spend our borrowed money on foreign petrochemicals for the foreseeable.
The adenoidal Miliboy will out-do the Tories’ madness by being more driven, and he’ll have the new National Wealth Fund (what a misnomer!!) to spaff.
Covid? Ukraine?
It’s hard to see how any government, and certainly not a Corbyn led one, could’ve handled either better, but they got crucified for that anyway.
Flip flop
Yet it now seems that Miliband might be taking a leaf out of notorious flip-flopper Keir Starmer’s book. One spokesman told the Telegraph that some outstanding applications would still be considered. But another then said that no new licences would be approved.
….
To make matters more confusing, by Thursday afternoon an official in Miliband’s department was denouncing the entire Telegraph article as a ‘complete fabrication’ and claiming that no decisions had yet been made. But given that Labour has been pledging this for some time now, it is reasonable to assume that a ban is in the works.
Indeed, whenever the ban does come in, the policy itself tells you all you need to know about Ed Miliband’s eco-zealotry. Just like those raving Just Stop Oil activists, he seems to think that the Net Zero ends will always justify the means.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/12/milibands-net-zero-militancy-is-a-disaster-in-the-making/
What’s the point of reviewing existing applications when you’ve already decided to refuse them? It’s just play-acting for show. But that’s Labour for you: all show and no substance. Mind you, the Tories lost the election because they’d become just like that themselves…
Here in Little Britain, it’s cold, wet, grey, dreary and miserable.
And that’s just the government…
As the saying goes, elections have consequences, as does apathy and ignorance.
The latest News: this has been denied. Apparently it’s “misinformation”.
I think the fact the oil companies said they were going to sue the Government to recover the £100 millions spent on preparatory work might have influenced minds in Government.
Yep https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ed-miliband-orders-immediate-ban-102141947.html
Guess the sheer magnitude of the lawsuits and the fact that the oil companies would win them all really, really scared them.
Windmiliband is a fool whose politics will ruin the UK.
All of this insanity to prevent 0.00001K of “warming”.
Not a Brit here, so can claim no expertise in UK politics. But as an outsider looking in, this seems to be a situation where the “perfect becomes an enemy of the good”. In that, the ascendance of the reform party clearly took away votes from the Tories who were at the very least, not radical warmunists (“luke warmers” is probably the best description) … unlike the Laborite warmunists who just took over the government in the UK and immediately went all-in to impose their warmunism on the British people.
I get that there has been frustration with the Tories for not being as strong defenders of freedom on the matter of warmunism, like the Republican Party in the USA has been for the most part. But putting the equivalent of AOC in power as “I’ll show you!” protest vote against the Tory leadership has clearly backfired.
Even if the wacky warmunist position gets modified due to voter backlash, or if there is a new election to restore decent governance before the 5 year standard term is expired, there’s one helluva lot of damage can be done to Brits in the meantime. The Brits do not appear to have anything equivalent to the US Supreme Court that has been routinely whacking down warmunist administration policies when Democrats have been in power, which has served as a last ditch shield against warmunist overreach in the USA.
Politics is mostly about building alliances where everybody doesn’t necessarily agree on everything, but they mostly agree on the most important things. That’s all a party is and ever was. Ronald Reagan’s “big tent” Republican Party leadership was built upon that notion. Among Reagan’s famous political quips was, “My 80% ally is not my 20% enemy.”
The lukewarmer Labour Lite Tories were gone anyway so may as well have it out now with Nige and Co as he’ll be the best thorn in Labor’s side while the wimps lick their wounds and regroup.
Stupid people voting for stupid people get the stupid they deserve.
Only 60% of the electorate bothered to show up. We had the choice of dumb left (Tory), dumber lefter (Labour), bonkers (LibDem – leader Ed Davey spent his run up falling off sail boards to look cool), flash Nigel with no plan and green. What would you do?
In the end only 20% of the electorate actually voted for the bunch we got.
“In the end only 20% of the electorate actually voted for the bunch we got.” You answered your own question, 40% of your voting population already know their votes will be thrown out by “the powers that be” so they just said fuckit. We are going through the same thing here. Until voters are required to be citizens of the country they are voting in and provide proof when voting, and receive a printed receipt of the ballot they cast for the candidates they choose shit is just going to get worse.
“…just going to get worse.” Certainly is – though I’d contend that it was actually the None Of The Above party that got the highest vote, rather than apathy.
Looks like it’s time to lay off all the regulatory staff working on the permit applications.
That’ll be the Day.. ooh…ooh
There Will Come Soft Rains
RIP GB.
RIP… aye, there’s the rub.
Perfect example of bad government in action. We don’t have a climate crisis we have a government crisis and a really big one.