Meanwhile, at the Royal Courts of Justice, campaigners celebrated a High Court ruling that granted charity Greenpeace permission to proceed with a judicial review of new oil and gas licensing in the North Sea.
The UK’s Secretary of State for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, Grant Shapps, has reassured Britain’s oil and gas industry that it has his full support to continue North Sea drilling during a keynote speech given at the Spectator’s Energy Summit on Wednesday.
At the event, which was sponsored by National Gas as well as Drax, Shapps told an audience mostly composed of energy sector professionals that it “simply makes no sense whatsoever to deny our own oil and gas, and instead import it – with twice the embedded carbon – from elsewhere in the world”. He added that it is “very important” to understand that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recognises the need for “some” oil and gas production in 2050 when the UK has reached net zero.
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Meanwhile, just one mile down the road at the Royal Courts of Justice, campaigners celebrated a High Court ruling that granted charity Greenpeace permission to proceed with a judicial review of the government’s decision to launch a new oil and gas licensing round in the North Sea.
On Wednesday morning, the judge gave Greenpeace permission to conduct a full judicial review into the government’s failure to take into account the environmental effects of consuming the oil and gas due to be extracted in the new licensing round, in which fossil fuel companies submitted more than 100 licences for exploration.
“See you in court” one campaigner wrote on Twitter tagging Shapps, who was in the process of assuring his audience that the government “will not shy away from awarding new licences where they are justified”. The fate of the controversial Rosebank oil field, with the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil and therefore exceed the UK’s carbon budget, remains undecided.
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Author: dizzy
Grant Shapps assures the UK’s oil and gas industry it has his full support to continue drilling
Suella Braverman misleads public with police hiring claims
https://leftfootforward.org/2023/04/suella-braverman-misleads-public-with-police-hiring-claims/
Government claims are “misleading and misplaced”
Suella Braverman has been called out over claims made this week that the government has hit record breaking police recruitment targets.
The government are declaring a victory for saying they have delivered a manifesto target of recruiting 20,000 more police officers in England and Wales, as Braverman appealed to the right-wing press by boasting that there are now more officers than ever before in the history of policing.
However this claim has come under rigorous scrutiny, not just from a fact checking charity but also from the Police Federation itself.
Whilst this number is correct based on an increase between 2019 and March 2023, the figures follow a substantial decline in police numbers from 2010 to 2017 – estimated by the charity Full Fact to be a fall of almost 22,000 officers.
Figures revealed that there are actually only around 3,500 more officers now than there were in 2010, due to the huge drop in numbers before 2017.
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https://leftfootforward.org/2023/04/suella-braverman-misleads-public-with-police-hiring-claims/
NIC and CCC call for urgent action to protect infrastructure from climate risks
The two organisations have written jointly to ministers on the urgent need for action on climate adaptation
The National Infrastructure Commission and Climate Change Committee have written jointly to government urging ministers to take steps to improve the resilience of key infrastructure services to the effects of climate change.
Building on recent reports by both organisations, the advisory bodies set out five steps to accelerate national adaptation planning to protect key networks:
- Setting clear and measurable goals for resilience, and action plans to deliver them
- Ensuring these standards are developed in time to inform forthcoming regulatory price control periods (which set investment levels for operators)
- Giving explicit duties for resilience to all infrastructure regulators
- Cabinet-level oversight of interdependencies and whole-system resilience
- Embedding resilience in infrastructure planning as we move to an economy more reliant on electricity
The letter was sent to Oliver Dowden MP, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Thérèse Coffey MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs yesterday (26 April).
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Question Time audience member perfectly sums up Britain’s wealth inequality
An excellent post from Left Foot Forward
Image of loads of money Question Time audience member perfectly sums up Britain’s wealth inequality
An audience member on BBC Question Time last night offered a perfect summary of the wealth inequality in Britain as a result of the government’s politically motivated economic choices.
The comment came after a question on the show which asked, “is it a bit rich, for the rich, to tell us to accept being poorer?”.
This was in response to an insensitive, to say the least, remark earlier this week by the Bank of England’s Chief Economist Huw Pill who said Britons, need to accept being poorer.
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“If you put the tax burden on the very rich, it’s like, ‘ok I have a slightly smaller bank balance at the end of the year’, but you’re still rich.
“And when I say rich, I don’t mean people on £100,000 or £200,000, we’re talking about people who have billions, you could never spend it in a lifetime, you could never spend it in ten lifetimes.
“Why is that you’re then putting the burden on people who have no money, it just doesn’t make sense.”
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Question Time audience member perfectly sums up Britain’s wealth inequality
