Sell Out Starmer Delivers For His Tax Haven Donors!

Right, so Keir Starmer is now delivering for his fossil fuel lobby donors, because their money is not given for nothing, the payoff is here and in doing so has also exposed his government’s alleged £22bn financial black hole to be a complete sham and whilst doing that has thrown climate change policy under the bus completely, all done all in one go, one fell swoop, he’s pleased the donors and flipped the bird to the tree huggers as he has referred to people who have the temerity to care about the planet and the environment as previously.
But to listen to our mainstream media, this is a huge win for the environment, this is great positive news, this is big up Keith headline stuff, but whilst they seek to keep dumbing people down, the truth of the matter is Starmer has done the complete opposite.
Right, so let’s start with the mainstream media spin on this story shall we? Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian, who of course are lauding such measures:
‘Rachel Reeves is paving the way for a multibillion-pound increase in public-sector investment at the budget after the government announced plans to commit almost £22bn over 25 years to fund carbon capture and storage projects.
In what is expected to be one of the biggest green spending promises of the parliament, the chancellor, prime minister and the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, will unveil the details on a visit to the Liverpool city region on Friday declaring a “new era” for clean energy jobs.
With less than a month before the 30 October budget, Reeves said the announcement would come as one of a “drumbeat” of measures to kickstart economic growth.’
Did you pick up on that figure quoted there? £22bn committed by the government over 25 years, as if Labour the state it is in will last for anything like that length of time, to fund carbon capture and storage projects. Now before I come onto that issue, because it is a big one, that’s £22bn Rachel Reeves has now found ahead of the budget, after she already ditched a £28bn to invest in Green infrastructure, new windfarms, investment in electric vehicle technology as well as having green policy at the heart of all government departmental commitments. It had been Labour policy since 2021, one of Starmer’s flagship policies, and Reeves ditched it as unaffordable. Now she’s found £22bn again to instead of doing that, which was good, she’s going down the carbon capture route.
But before I get onto that, that figure of £22bn coming from a Labour politicians mouth is a rather familiar noise, because isn’t that exactly the size of the black hole in the government finances Labour all of sudden happened to discover despite all of us already knowing about the state of the finances thanks to the IFS and the OBR? You can imagine what climate change denialists are now saying can’t you, because Labour have refused to break down their alleged £22bn shortfall? Of course they are now saying Labour are creating that black hole in the finances to appease something they don’t believe in anyway, which is massively damaging to the most important political crisis the entire world faces, climate change and the fight against it and the changes that must be made if we’re to save the planet and save ourselves.
What this is, is a Labour face saving attempt ahead of what is expected to be an appalling budget for most of us, but is being exposed very quickly as a sham. If Reeves can find £22bn over 25 years, she could have stuck by the original green invest plan which was only £6bn more, stretched out he timeframe arguably instead of ditching it completely apparently based on cost, yet can find nearly as much money again for what is a pointless and useless exercise on the national scale?
Obviously the optics of this were going to be exposed by someone, somewhere a few of us are piping up about this today, so what is actually going on here in which case and fundamentally it all boils down to Labour now delivering for lobbyists who have given them massive amounts of cash to buy policy in effect.
As you may have heard of, but has consistently gone underreported, though some mainstream sources did get shamed into mentioning this eventually, Labour, during the General Election campaign, at a very convenient time in the election cycle, were given the largest donation in the party’s history, £4m from Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, regular viewers of this channel will be familiar with the story, so I won’t go into it in any particular detail again here, however, it was noted by me that amongst the 1600 or so financial interests, assets that Quadrature manage, there are a number of fossil fuel interests amongst them, who Quadrature would be lobbying in the interests of and Quadrature itself had a climate interest that I’d skirted over broadly, the Quadrature Climate Foundation, of which Keir Starmer has just appointed the co-chair of, Rachel Kyte, to the position of government climate envoy, so Quadrature very much getting their feet under the table with government climate policy, in a position to influence it much further.
Now with the fossil fuel interests I knew that Quadrature had, I was struggling admittedly to square the hole over how they could have a climate foundation, the two didn’t at first glance make sense, but now that Starmer and Reeves have made this green policy announcement of £22bn over 25 years to invest in carbon capture and carbon storage, which is absolutely flaming useless at a national level. There’s a claim it’ll create some 4000 jobs too, but that’s only 160 jobs per year over 25 years at a cost of nearly £5.5m per job. I bet they don’t get paid that much!
This isn’t dealing with a national carbon footprint, this isn’t aiming for net zero, this is sweeping it under the carpet and that does help the fossil fuel lobby a lot, because it means their interests remain safe, whilst Keir Starmer who keeps harping on about hating sticking plater politics has just taken a great big roll of Elastoplast and bound Labour climate policy up in the stuff. It’ll hurt the nation in the long run, like a plaster pulled off a hair arm and having been to the blood donor yesterday I know exactly what that feels like this morning!
Carbon capture and carbon storage, is unproven and largely believed to be a nonsense, it can never be national policy it isn’t a sustainable long term plan.
Some might imagine this is akin to reducing your carbon footprint, we can take such thinking on upon ourselves, for example if you cut your grass, leave the clippings where they are. As the clippings decompose, the carbon that releases goes back into the soil, soil being great for at capturing carbon, but this is something called sequestration and it’s a natural process and we can all reduce our own carbon footprint doing that. As a Green Town Councillor I’m actually involved in looking at sequestration to reduce the town council’s carbon footprint, so slightly larger scale, but it’s still somewhat of a personal or low level carbon usage being offset, it’s fascinating as it’s still something largely being researched but frankly that is the limit of practicality for such measures. Doing our own bit, or on a smallish scale. But national policy needs to be far more forward thinking. When you’re bought and paid for though, you never can be. The only carbon capture technology in existence that works is nature itself.
Ultimately big changes to national climate infrastructure are needed to just simply reduce carbon production and work towards phasing it out. With the Labour government now talking about carbon capture on a national scale, this isn’t happening, this is delivering really, for Quadrature and their clients. It cannot be seen in any other light and others are certainly calling it out too.
George Monbiot, who writes for the Guardian, won’t be impressed with his own paper’s coverage of this story at all I’m sure today, in fact I know he isn’t because he shared the article along with a tweet reading:
‘This is absolute madness. Carbon capture and storage has failed time and again. Labour has slashed reliable green programmes, to pour vast sums of our money into a complete crock. The only possible explanation is lobbying by fossil fuel companies.’
He is not wrong, he is absolutely dead right and that £4m donation to Starmer and Co is still paying dividends for that lobby and I’m still not sure Labour has delivered £4m worth of alleged kickbacks for cash in relation to this, a waste of cash to excuse fossil fuels still being allowed to be burned.
Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski has also made much the same point as Monbiot, though is on exactly the same page as myself here, saying:
‘Sequence of events: Labour take a £4m donation from Quadrature - hedge fund in the Cayman Islands - with links to oil & gas industry. Having dropped their £28bn green pledge & home insulation programme in government they instead invest in green washing for oil & gas.’
Of all parties the Greens are probably the ones most expected to respond to this issue and Polanski nails it.
It’d be remiss of me to also not point out that more and more people are still choosing to go Green – shameless plug for my own party warning incoming - and leave Labour too, Labour having suffered a catastrophically huge by-election loss last night, losing a seat on Lancaster City Council to the Greens, their vote share from previously virtually halved, with the Tories also down and all of it pretty much going to the Greens, now making them the largest party on Lancaster City Council for the first time ever. A party not bought and paid for by lobbyists, unlike the big mainstream parties. More and more people are turning away from that to new prospects like the Greens and its not just for the climate either, but the fact remains to actually change things in this country, moving away from the Tory and Labour duopoly is the only that can happen. We have to start changing who we vote for, because very government seems to be just as corrupt and sold out as the last one carrying on as we are.
It isn’t just on the climate the Starmer and Co are selling the country out for though, it seems the long term sick and disabled are being shafted too as Labour’s DWP minister Liz Kendall has been caught out getting to close to one of the worst offenders of work capability assessments out there, giving the impression that there will be no change for them either as promised by Keir Starmer to the electorate as this video recommendation will tell you all about and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.