Claire Coutinho came out swinging at the Tory party conference in Manchester, pledging to “axe the Carbon Tax” and “scrap Ed Miliband’s rip-off wind farm subsidies” in a fiery speech that set out her plan for “cheap, reliable, abundant energy”.
The Shadow Energy Secretary told delegates: “In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing.”
She said the Conservatives had always delivered prosperity through cheap power, from “Thatcher’s North Sea oil boom” to the coal-fuelled industrial revolution, but accused Labour of turning energy into a stealth tax that was “making us all poorer and killing our industry”.
Coutinho blasted Labour’s net zero strategy as a “poverty mindset” that “forces ordinary people to be the servants of their climate targets”.
She said: “Net zero isn’t working for Britain, and it’s not working for the climate. Watching good jobs move abroad is not just. Piling more pain onto people’s bills is not just.”
In a direct attack on Ed Miliband, she mocked his energy policies as “mad”, saying:
“Only Ed Miliband could launch an £8 billion energy company that won’t produce any energy. Let’s call it what it is — a vanity project that won’t cut bills. So we will scrap it.”
She went further, accusing the government of “burning wood shipped from America at three times the cost of gas and four times the pollution levels of our last coal plant”.
Her verdict on Miliband’s climate law was equally blunt: “Every five years, targets are drawn up that dictate what products people must buy, and when, and in what quantities. Conference, we had a name for that back in the 70s — it’s central planning.”
Coutinho said Labour’s approach had left Britain with “the highest industrial electricity prices in the world”, destroying jobs from Wigan to Grangemouth.
She pledged that the next Conservative government would “repeal the Climate Change Act” and “reverse Ed’s mad ban on new oil and gas licences”.
“Our policies to axe the Carbon Tax and scrap Ed’s rip-off wind subsidies would cut people’s electricity bills by 20%,” she said.
“The average family will save £165 a year. This could be done tomorrow.”
Coutinho closed with a rallying cry that landed well with delegates: “When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be fake promises, it will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy. Energy is prosperity — and we will never forget that again.”
