Rishi Sunak should think hard about incentivising communities to welcome fracking sites
RISHI Sunak’s decision to reimpose the fracking ban is an own-goal.
Why block a potentially vast source of UK-produced gas in an economic crisis brought about by a dire shortage of it?
The shale ban was the one howler in the Tories’ 2019 election-winning pitch.
While our new PM rightly wants to return to that manifesto’s basic principles, circumstances change.
We have since been hit by Covid and Putin’s war.
Without new nuclear power plants, and with Europe starved of Russian gas, we will need extra supplies for years on the journey to Net Zero.
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Wind and solar alone won’t power our homes and businesses.
The absurd scaremongering over fracking is based on decades-old horror stories and myths from when it was an unregulated new industry in the States.
It is depressing that families terrified about years of sky-high energy bills still swallow the anti-shale propaganda.
Mr Sunak should think hard about incentivising communities to welcome fracking sites, such as with half-price energy or even free gas.
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He should not shut off a possible game-changer for our energy supply and security.
Pay up, Shell
WITH Shell announcing huge new profits it is getting ever harder to argue against a further windfall tax, not least because the oil giant hasn’t paid any of the first one.
In just three months it has raked in £8.2billion, thanks to Putin’s genocide.
Technically it should pay 65 per cent tax. In fact it pays almost none because of a clause allowing it to offset its increased investment in the North Sea.
Yes, of course we need that for our future oil and gas. But those profits are still obscene . . . as are families’ bills.
As it stands, those will only be limited until next April — and only then by a taxpayer-funded bailout.
New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt must ensure Shell and BP cannot further enrich themselves off the backs of broke bill-payers and Ukraine’s violated people.
Noah’s snark
SINCE Brexit, the American Left has bent over backwards to trash Britain.
The New York Times, a once-mighty paper now run by woke children, devotes acres of space to blatant lies it invents to run down our country for Twitter “likes”.
Now news presenter and comic Trevor Noah, before a TV audience of millions, mocks a racist “backlash” in Britain against our first Hindu PM.
A backlash he has entirely made up.
There is no backlash, Trevor.
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Because Britain is infinitely more racially inclusive than American liberals imagine — and infinitely less racially divided than America itself.
Did it never trouble him, as he wrote this brainless skit, that he had not a shred of evidence to support it?