Latest updates: Diane Abbott says Miliband and Keir Starmer have given different reasons for Corbyn’s ban
Labour has now sent out the full text of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Green Alliance this morning. We have already covered the main points (here and at 10.55am), but it was a substantial, serious speech, and here are some futher things he said.
Miliband confirmed that Labour would issue no more licence for oil and gas fields in the North Sea. This is from my colleague Fiona Harvey.
If every country did what the UK government wants to do and extract every last drop of North Sea oil and gas, we would bust our global carbon budget many times over and end up at three degrees of warming.
I promise you: This will all change under a Labour government.
He summed up the argument of his speech like this:
First, we are at a decisive moment when it comes to the global race for the green jobs of the future.
Second, net zero is a massive economic opportunity for Britain but we are losing the global race.
He said the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the US has been a “game-changing event’” for green energy investment decisions. He said:
Talk to any business and they will tell you the same thing: this is a game-changing event in investment decisions.
In everything from electric car manufacture to hydrogen to batteries and heat pumps.
He said the IRA was “a modern green industrial policy at work – an active state deploying public investment to crowd in and catalyse private investment”. He also said the IRA was represented “a departure from the past because it’s a big investment in onshoring manufacturing”. That meant it was “a rejection of the dominant economic model of the last four decades in which advanced economies were generally unconcerned about where manufacturing happened”.
He said the UK was already “behind in the global race” for green energy. He said:
There are already 23 clean steel demonstration plants across Europe but none in the UK.
Forty gigafactories across Europe now expected to be open and producing batteries by 2030, but only 1 is currently certain here.
He said Labour would pass a Green Prosperity Act to give “a clear long term framework to give stability for investors”.
He said that talks with the US suggested British firms might be able to benefit from some of the subsidies available under the IRA. This is from the i’s Paul Waugh.
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