Chancellor Rachel Reeves blamed Donald Trump for the UK economy shrinking in January. That’s just not true.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is destroying his own country’s industry (Image: Getty)
Trump wasn’t to blame for GDP contracting by 0.1% in January. The world wasn’t taking the US president’s tariff threats seriously at that point.
His shameful bullying of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office didn’t happen until the end of February.
If the economy slumps more than expected in March, Reeves can pin some of the blame on Trump. But not today.
Reeves is known for playing fast and loose with the truth. She bizarrely assumes we won’t notice, but we always do.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a cruel dictator but he isn’t to blame for the January slump either.
Rachel Reeves herself is the most obvious culprit.
She’s made a total hash of the economy since becoming Chancellor. I could spend the rest of this article listing her errors, but thankfully, there’s no need. Here’s a list of 20 disastrous mistakes I prepared earlier.
At least Reeves has woken up to the damage s he’s inflicted by talking the UK economy down and hiking taxes.
She’s suddenly obsessed with growth, which is ironic, given how much she’s done to destroy it.
Yet Reeves isn’t the only Labour figure wreaking havoc on our productive capacity.
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Another key player has arguably inflicted even more pain on UK industry. Worse, he won’t stop. And he certainly won’t admit his mistakes.
That man is Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
Climate change is a serious issue. But his madcap response has driven him to commit an unforgivable act: deliberately sabotaging the UK economy.
Unlike Reeves, who stumbled into her mess through incompetence, Miliband’s damage is intentional.
The UK’s high energy prices are the highest in the developed world, putting a huge burden on households and making it impossible for energy-intensive manufacturing businesses to compete.
Miliband’s priority was to drive energy prices down. Instead, his policies will do the opposite.
His first move? Shuttering remaining North Sea oil and gas projects, leaving us even more dependent on imported fossil fuels.
Then, throw tens of billions at unproven green tech while slapping extra levies on industrial energy to fund the transition.
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Miliband has also been dishonest, claiming Net Zero will lower household bills when in practice they’ll cost us a fortune.
The result? UK industry is shutting down. We’ve just dropped out of the world’s top 10 manufacturing nations for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, according latest data from trade body Make UK.
Under Miliband’s watch, Scotland’s last oil refinery at Grangemouth has shut down. Port Talbot’s final blast furnace has gone. Vauxhall owner Stellantis is closing its Luton car factory. Oil giants BP and Shell are threatening to quit the FTSE for New York.
No other country is sabotaging itself like this. Others balance their energy policies, keeping power affordable while gradually shifting to green alternatives.
Miliband doesn’t care. While he remains in post, he’s doing more damage than Trump, Putin and Rachel Reeves put together.
Starmer knows this. If he’s serious about rebooting his struggling government, he must decommission his misfiring Energy Secretary now.
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