Ed Miliband wa torn apart by Jacqueline Foster over his latest push for net zero, as she admitted she “wonders if he is quite well”.
Speaking to GB News, Baroness Foster criticised the Energy Secretary’s latest wind farm deal costing the taxpayer £1.8billion.
She told host Michelle Dewberry: “He’s apparently now just signed a deal for £1.8billion where they’re going to build wind farms. And obviously there’s all the subsidies and all the contracts are a part of all of that.
“Look, I think most of us are fully aware and fully supportive of the fact that you need to look for alternative sources of energy, and I think we’ve made real progress over the years.
“But fundamentally, when you are running an industrialised society like we are with the populations that we have, we know we need things like North Sea gas. The coal industry was the king, we built the industrial revolution on coal and steel and all of those things.
“So we have got the will and we have got the scientists and we’ve had a lot of investment into alternative ways to basically run this country and industry.”
Criticising Mr Miliband, Baroness Foster swiped: “But it seems to me, I’m not sure whether he’s quite well, because it seems to me every time he turns round, Ed Miliband, he seems to come up with another wheeze.
“And anybody that sorts of challenges that we’re all going to be climate change deniers, which we’re clearly not. But notwithstanding that, we cannot power this nation relying on wind. We just can’t.”
Jacqueline Foster brutally mocked Ed Miliband over his latest energy deal
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GB NEWS / PA
Arguing the push for net zero is “destroying parts of our industry”, Baroness Foster said: “I think we saw the figures last week, there was one day we were getting something like nine per cent of our energy from wind.
“And so therefore, the fact that they decided then to pull the licences from the North Sea when we actually need fossil fuel, we need all of these things to keep going, we equally can’t store any extra sort of energy coming from a wind farm.
“It’s just destroying Aberdeen. It’s basically destroying part of our industry and we have the Norwegians and others who are actually escalating their use and their drilling because they know how to run a country.”
Taking aim at Labour’s previous pledge to Britons to bring down energy bills, she added: “Your bills aren’t going down, everybody. He’s tried to tell us last week that the bills were going down £150 a year, a couple of quid a week and then we have this massive cold spell.
Ed Miliband has been criticised for hiking people’s energy bills | GETTY
“So it seems as though we’re knocking on, as we used to say in the North, you’re knocking on the door and there’s nobody in. Because as much as we try and say we need to have a good balance here and we need to not be hostile towards obviously, the oil and gas industry, it’s just not sinking in.”
Arguing in defence of wind power, Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani told GB News: “So the ambition for Labour is to decarbonise our electricity system as quickly as possible.
“That’s not all energy, it’s the electricity grid. So you’d still have things like petrol and gas used for maritime and aviation and cars and heating with gas systems, but electricity would come from renewable sources.”
He continued: “That has some downsides, in the short to medium term, it’s going to mean that costs are higher. But I’m a fan of wind being part of the mix for two reasons. Firstly, we have lots of it and it can’t just be cut off or be subject to the whims of the global energy market because there is a war or revolution somewhere else.
Baroness Foster told GB News
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GB NEWS
“Secondly, because it helps us meet certain ambitions with regards to decarbonising. It can’t be the majority of the energy mix, that’s not really plausible for a few reasons, you can’t store wind, you can’t store solar. This is called intermittency. These are often disrupted sources of energy. So how do you meet the meet the gap? Historically, we’ve used gas.
“But of course, if you want to get away from fossil fuels, you can’t use gas anymore. And I think the big mistake this country’s made over the last 25 years is to not build more nuclear power stations. We should have built more nuclear power stations rather than shut them down.”
He concluded: “We’ve forgotten that, we’ve lost that muscle memory. Britain, believe it or not, was the first country in the world to have a large civilian nuclear power station anywhere on earth. It was here.
“Now Britain can’t build those kinds of pieces of infrastructure without help from France, which I think is really saying something about how how badly we’ve been governed over the last 70 years or 60 years.”