We should have got cracking with fracking to keep Britain heated and powered

Gas implosion

TIME and again The Sun warned successive Governments of the dangerous folly of having no long-term plan for keeping the nation heated and powered.

It has meant relying on gas imports and trusting our unreliable weather to generate wind or solar energy as we closed down other options.

It was obvious it put us at the mercy of events.

And here we are with the wholesale gas price rocketing, firms folding and the possible risk of supplies being cut.

Plus a related CO2 shortage threatening to leave supermarket shelves empty.

Add all those to Covid, flu, rising inflation, looming tax rises and now soaring energy bills and the next few months could make the 1979 Winter of Discontent look like a summer party.

Long ago we should have got cracking with fracking. Shale gas could have powered and heated Britain cheaply for decades.

But the sort of scaremongering fanatics now crippling the M25 blocked that too — and the Tories surrendered.

So we banned fracking, closed power plants and let our nuclear energy ­programme decline.

Then we blithely committed to zero emissions by 2050, a laudable aim but without a thought given to how households will pay for it.

This latest price blip alone is set to cost us all hundreds of pounds a year.
Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is “confident supply can be maintained”.
But that’s been the problem all along:

Over-confidence, complacency and a scandalous failure to plan.

Fair on jabs

THE world’s richest nations have a duty to help vaccinate the poorest against Covid. And Britain is doing so.

The Government first put £90million into developing the Oxford/Astra– Zeneca jab, produced for no profit.

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More than half a billion AZ shots have been injected, two-thirds in poorer countries.

Britain has pledged 100million more. We are one of the biggest donors to the Covax distribution scheme.

So it is absurd to claim giving over-50s boosters rather than donating our stock is “immoral”. We are doing our bit.

But the Government also has a duty to its own citizens. Even two jabs are not 100 per cent safe.

A booster may save thousands of OAPs’ lives this winter.

If they died for lack of it, Boris Johnson would be blamed by the very same critics attacking him over the Third World.

Clown cult

THE callous narcissists of “Insulate ­Britain” revel in the distress they cause drivers. Indeed they rely on it.

But even they must wonder about the lunacy of their position when they prevent a builder from carrying out home insulation.

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How typical, though, of cops to seize HIM as he confronted them . . .

Leaving the idiots to spread more misery, as a nation’s resolve hardens against them.