A gas field is approved, a minister admits it will not cut bills, and the leeks decline to comment.
BRISTOL, England (The London Prat) – The leeks have not been told about the energy transition, and are doing what leeks do in a damp autumn, which is nothing, slowly. I stood over plot fourteen at eight this morning with a fork I had no real intention of using, and wondered whether it is possible to hold a political opinion and a wet cabbage at the same time. It is, as it turns out, the only way I hold either.
Row One: The Leeks
There are twenty-two of them, planted in straight lines with a dibber, and they are the only thing in my life which has ever done what the instructions said. Gwen on plot sixteen came across with a flask and told me they are far too close together. Gwen has been telling me this since June. I have decided to take it as a form of friendship.
She also had the radio on in her shed, which is a transistor of great age and fierce loyalty, and it was reading the news. I listened, as one does, with one boot on a fork, to a Westminster story I had read twice and understood once.
Row Two: The Gas Field
The story was Jackdaw. LBC’s report on the approval says the government has agreed that the regulator can grant consent for the North Sea gas field, with production due to begin by the end of the month, raising domestic gas output by about 6 per cent at its peak. The government says it could supply gas for up to 11 years and add an estimated 2.9 billion pounds to the economy. In 2024 the High Court had overturned an earlier licence because the emissions from burning the gas had not been considered.
Now the sentence I keep returning to. The Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, admitted that the approval will not lower energy bills. She said it was about energy security and homegrown energy, and compatible with the climate commitments. I have never admired a minister more for saying a true thing in the middle of making a decision that seemed to need a different one. It is the sort of candour that, in a cabinet minister, should be put in a frame.
The government also says it remains committed to ending new oil and gas licences, and the Chancellor announced an Energy Wealth Fund starting with 2 billion pounds to channel North Sea revenue into clean energy. Labour supporters argue that neither Jackdaw nor Rosebank is a new field, since the work began before they took office. That is a reasonable argument. It is also the kind that sounds best when you are not standing in a vegetable bed, trying to explain it to a woman with a flask.
The Announcement Itself
The part that amused me, I confess, was how it was done. A Spectator Australia column on Prime Minister’s Questions reports that Kemi Badenoch opened by congratulating the government on approving Jackdaw, that the Conservatives cheered, and that Labour MPs were muted. The column adds that Fahnbulleh did not come to the Commons to announce it herself, and that the junior minister Michael Shanks did so instead, and was rebuked by the Speaker for the leak of the announcement beforehand.
That is the column’s account and the column is an opinion piece, so I give it as such. But it has the unmistakable shape of a decision made by people who would rather the decision had been made by weather.
Row Three: The Greens
Now, the Greens, who will not have been surprised. Zack Polanski called the decision “climate vandalism” and said it was a victory for Shell over the public. Greenpeace UK’s Ami McCarthy, quoted in the same LBC piece, said the project will not lower bills or boost energy security and will create only 27 full-time jobs. These are strongly worded, and I think they are serious positions, and I will not pretend otherwise.
What I would gently say is that the Greens are very good at the sentence and rather less at the sum. Back in July, their own press release asked the incoming Prime Minister to cut bills by at least 150 pounds before the autumn price cap, by moving policy costs on to general taxation at a stated cost of about 3.2 billion pounds, to be covered through wealth taxation, including National Insurance on investment income, which they said could raise at least 6.1 billion pounds a year. It is a coherent document, and the arithmetic is shown. It is also not a programme that has yet been put to the Treasury and survived, and I notice that “vandalism” has been spoken more often than “the 6.1 billion”.
The Government, in the meantime, is the party that actually has a lever, and has chosen the one marked gas. I would call that a policy of two columns, one for the speech and one for the field.
Row Four: The Song
By ten the drizzle had decided it was permanent. Gwen, in the shed, began to hum something, and I realised to my horror that it was the one about the farm, with all the animals and the noises. I am afraid my reading habits are too wide: only last week I had stumbled upon a story about the Old Macdonald song getting new words, and now it will not leave me. If the Government can revise a gas policy in a sentence, a nursery rhyme can surely get a verse about carbon capture. Ee-i-ee-i-oh.
I went home with a bag of leeks, a bunch of chard, and a persistent sense of having missed the argument. If you would like a different angle on the week in English politics, I would send you to the English news desk at The London Prat, and for a change of dialect there is a handy page on Cockney rhyming slang, which is as near as I come to a regional lexicon.
Tonight I shall make leek and potato soup, and not discuss Jackdaw with it. You will find more of my daily notes at The London Prat, on days when the leeks are less opinionated.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/