DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Labour's green plan would beggar us all

With the election campaign just a week old, we have already seen a plethora of dubious assertions, backed by equally dubious statistics.

Rachel Reeves' claim that putting VAT on private school fees would raise enough to fund 6,500 new state sector teachers springs immediately to mind.

But for the sheer scale of self-delusion involved, nothing matches Labour's plan to 'make Britain a clean energy superpower', launched in Scotland yesterday.

There was a sense of the absurd from the start when Sir Keir Starmer arrived to preach his carbon reduction sermon by gas-guzzling private jet. He appeared not to appreciate the irony.

The claims made in the policy document are truly fantastic. Cut bills by £1,400 a year, 50,000 new jobs in Scotland alone, mass insulation, zero-carbon by 2030.

With the election campaign just a week old, we have already seen a plethora of dubious assertions, backed by equally dubious statistics

The first step would be to create a new quango (because that always works), supported by a National Wealth Fund of up to £8.3billion. But as Sir Keir keeps telling us we have no national wealth, where will the money come from?

Topping up already high levies on oil and gas firms may raise a fraction of it but certainly not all. The rest can come only from higher taxes or more borrowing.

Also, how many jobs will be lost in the oil and gas sectors as this transformation takes shape? The SNP puts the figure at 100,000.

Trade unions, too, expressed their disquiet. GMB chief Gary Smith describes the strategy as 'bad for investment, jobs and national security'. Unite says it is not 'viable' and urges Sir Keir to reconsider.

Rachel Reeves' claim that putting VAT on private school fees would raise enough to fund 6,500 new state sector teachers springs immediately to mind

And what of the inevitable public opposition to covering the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels? Labour says it will 'back the builders, not the blockers'. So will they ride roughshod over local objections to these eyesores?

Then there's the cost of replacing domestic gas boilers with massively expensive and often less efficient air source heat pumps.

No doubt Sir Keir and energy spokesman Ed Miliband can afford one, but many hard-pressed families can't.

This country is already a world leader in carbon reduction, even though we produce just 1 per cent of global greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2023 we became the first major economy to halve emissions and we are rapidly increasing renewables. The Government hopes to reach Net Zero by 2035.

This is the sensible course. Racing to that target by 2030 would create genuine hardship and almost certainly crash the economy. It is simply untenable.

Like so many of Sir Keir's policies, it looks fine on paper but unravels at first contact with reality.

The divided states

Whatever your view of Donald Trump, his felony conviction by a New York court is profoundly damaging to Western security.

It exposes once again the deep fracture in American society, with one half celebrating the guilty verdict and the other believing it to be a cynical stitch-up designed to torpedo Trump's election chances.

Whatever your view of Donald Trump, his felony conviction by a New York court is profoundly damaging to Western security

It exposes once again the deep fracture in American society, with one half celebrating the guilty verdict and the other believing it to be a cynical stitch-up designed to torpedo Trump's election chances

Given the perilous state of the world, we need America to be strong. Right now, it looks weak and hopelessly divided.

The verdict will not prevent Trump running for President, but that means the choice for leader of the free world could well be between a convicted felon and an elderly man clearly past his intellectual prime.

How unedifying. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the rest of the world's tyrants must be rubbing their hands with glee.