A statement from Sean Houlston, Conservative candidate for Sandbach East and Central regarding the planned climate protest in Sandbach:
I have to question what tomorrow’s climate protest in Sandbach is actually intended to achieve.
The campaigners are calling for further restrictions on domestic energy production and for Cheshire East Council to move faster towards its carbon neutral targets. But who exactly are they protesting against? People shopping in Sandbach on a Saturday do not decide national energy policy, and Sandbach Town Council certainly does not decide whether Britain develops oil and gas in the North Sea.
More importantly, what are the protesters actually asking people to accept in order to meet these targets? How much will it cost? Who pays? What happens to household bills, local businesses and jobs? And where does our energy come from when renewable generation cannot meet demand?
Britain has spent too long approaching energy policy from the wrong direction. The first responsibility of government should be to make sure this country has a secure, reliable and affordable supply of energy.
That means making proper use of our own resources while we need them. We should produce oil and gas domestically rather than importing more from overseas, build substantially more nuclear capacity and ensure that Britain has enough dependable generation to keep homes warm, businesses running and the lights on.
Once that secure foundation is in place, I would go further and open up energy properly to competition.
Renewables should absolutely have a major role in Britain’s future, but they should increasingly succeed because they are competitive, efficient and commercially viable, not because government has picked technologies, imposed arbitrary targets or loaded subsidies and levies onto people’s bills.
If wind, solar, battery storage or new technologies can produce cheaper and secure power, the free market should allow them to expand rapidly. Innovation will ultimately do far more to deliver cleaner energy than politicians attempting to engineer the entire energy system from Whitehall.
That is the distinction I think is missing from protests like this one. The choice is not between caring about the environment and ignoring it. It is between an ideological approach which starts with a net zero deadline and works backwards, regardless of cost, and a pragmatic approach which starts with energy security and affordability before allowing cleaner technologies to compete and win.
I want Britain to become cleaner and more energy independent. But I want us to get there by building, innovating and competing, not by making energy scarcer and more expensive.
So before demanding that Sandbach or the country moves faster, campaigners should answer some basic questions: what will their proposals cost, what happens to our energy security, and why should families and businesses be forced to pay more when there is a better way?
