RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: No heat pump? Put your thermals on, you’re nicked
Outraged at having to pay £12.50 a day for driving your ‘non-compliant’ car in Genghis Khan’s Ulez zone, or one of the other cynical low emissions rackets popping up everywhere? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The eco-maniacs are coming for your house next, as part of their deranged mission to make us all colder and poorer.
Under new legislation, which sailed through its third reading in the Commons this week, homeowners and landlords whose properties don’t meet Net Zero targets could be fined £15,000 and jailed for up to a year. Yep, you could end up behind bars if you fail to fit a heat pump.
While most reporting of the Energy Bill has centred on the Government’s shameful U-turn on allowing onshore wind farms, there has been scant coverage of the clauses which criminalise failure to comply with ‘energy efficiency’ regulations.
If the Bill passes into law, it will provide for the imposition of ‘civil penalties’ not exceeding £15,000 and ‘criminal offences’ not exceeding 12 months’ imprisonment.
Under new legislation, which sailed through its third reading in the Commons this week, homeowners and landlords whose properties don’t meet Net Zero targets could be fined £15,000 and jailed for up to a year. Yep, you could end up behind bars if you fail to fit a heat pump
While most reporting of the Energy Bill has centred on the Government ‘s shameful U-turn on allowing onshore wind farms , there has been scant coverage of the clauses which criminalise failure to comply with ‘energy efficiency’ regulations
Anyone selling or letting a property must obtain an energy performance certificate. Inspectors will be given the power to order ‘improvements’ and prevent the property being sold or let if they are not carried out to the letter.
Such improvements will include fitting heat pumps, loft insulation, double glazing and so-called ‘smart appliances’.
Compulsory installation of smart meters, fridges, washing machines, immersion heaters and so on, all connected to the internet, will allow the Government and the energy companies to monitor electricity consumption and switch off your supply if they think you’re using too much.
I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all there in Hansard, Parliament’s official record.
When the Energy Bill’s third reading came before the House this week, only a handful of MPs spoke out against it. Honourable mentions must go to Tory members, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Craig Mackinlay and Richard Drax. (Drax B, as he’s known in the trade.)
The rest of the Muppets sat on their hands, or retired to the subsidised bars and restaurants, as this sinister piece of legislation slithered its way through the session, virtually unopposed. Some of the more bonkers MPs even thought these draconian proposals didn’t go far enough.
Brighton’s Green MP Caroline ‘Here We Go Looby’ Lucas called for an immediate end to all gas and oil exploration on the bizarre grounds that this would free us from dependence on Vlad Putin?
Eh?
Outraged at having to pay £12.50 a day for driving your ‘non-compliant’ car in Genghis Khan’s Ulez zone, or one of the other cynical low emissions rackets popping up everywhere? You ain’t seen nothing yet . Pictured: London mayor Sadiq Khan
Ed Miliband moved an amendment which would have forced the National Grid to get rid of all fossil fuels by 2030.
Nurse!
Fortunately Mister Ed’s economic suicide prescription fell at the first hurdle. But Tuesday’s risible ‘debate’ only served to demonstrate just how comprehensively, and apparently irreversibly, our elected representatives have capitulated to the Net Zero nutcases.
When push came to shove, only 19 MPs voted against the Bill. So out of a grand total of 650, we must assume that 631 either couldn’t be bothered or genuinely believe turning homeowners into criminals in their insane crusade to cut the world’s carbon output by a piffling 1 per cent is a proper way to behave in a modern alleged democracy. Do they really think people should be banged up for failing to fit a heat pump? And is this the desperate state to which a so-called Conservative Party — which is supposed to stand for individual liberty and a property-owning democracy — has been reduced?
Answers on TikTok to No 10, since social media is about the only thing politicians seem to give a toss about these days.
Spineless Sunak performs an immediate reverse ferret every time he comes under pressure from his backbenches. His latest climbdown was over onshore windfarms, which he promised to ban during his leadership campaign.
Following a revolt by a bunch of virtue-signalling MPs, with an eye on their future career prospects after the Tories’ inevitable defenestration next year, the PM buckled.
Anti-ULEZ protest outside Down Street on the day the controversial charges were introduced
Pictured: ULEZ cameras stolen from traffic lights in Eastcote, Pinner in the London Borough of Hillingdon
They were led by Alok Sharma, the former windmills minister, who actually burst into tears back in 2021 when delegates at the COP26 jamboree watered down his proposals to take the world back to the Stone Age.
(Maybe when Nurse Ratched has finished with Mister Ed, she might give Alok the once-over.)
I wonder if Sharma bothered to read the comments of Indian Prime Minister Modi yesterday, as he hosted the G20 summit in Delhi. Modi made it clear in no uncertain terms that unless the West bribed ’emerging’ economies like his own to decarbonise, there was no question of India shutting down, let alone refraining from opening new, coal-fired power stations.
Call it $100 billion for cash.
All this at a time Sunak is trying to stitch up a trade deal with India. So he’s happy to do business with a major international polluter, but at the same time thinks it’s a good idea to send his own citizens to jail for failing to fit a heat pump, which won’t make the slightest difference to global emissions.
And you thought Genghis Khan’s Ulez was as bad as it gets? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Put your thermals on, chummy, you’re nicked.
An Iranian national trying to cross the Atlantic to Britain on a giant hamster wheel has been arrested 70 miles off the coast of Georgia.
He apparently set off from Florida, where he had been living. My guess is that he was worried Florida governor Ron DeSantis would put him on a bus to a Democrat-run sanctuary city such as New York.
So he decided to try his luck in Britain instead, confident in the knowledge that we’d roll out the red carpet and he’d be billeted in a four-star hotel with zero prospect of ever being deported.
An Iranian national trying to cross the Atlantic to Britain on a giant hamster wheel has been arrested 70 miles off the coast of Georgia. He apparently set off from Florida , where he had been living. My guess is that he was worried Florida governor Ron DeSantis would put him on a bus to a Democrat-run sanctuary city such as New York. So he decided to try his luck in Britain instead, confident in the knowledge that we’d roll out the red carpet and he’d be billeted in a four-star hotel with zero prospect of ever being deported
Reza Baluchi (pictured during a previous attempt in 2014) was detained 70 miles into his journey which he was trying to make in a human powered hamster wheel
Baluchi’s vessel (pictured here in 2021), a giant hamster wheel, was declared unsafe. He was using it to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Florida to Britain
Several years ago, this column imagined migrants coming across the Channel on everything from lilos and jet skis to inflatable swans, illustrated by another of Gary’s brilliant cartoons.
Now that the Government is spending £2million a year rounding up abandoned dinghies along the Kent coast and attempting to stop China and Turkey supplying the people smugglers with replacements, how long before migrants start looking for alternative vessels?
Everybody back on the hamster wheel!
Life’s a beach and then you fry
The British are the most workshy in Europe, according to a new survey. Tell us something we don’t know. On Wednesday, only 20 per cent of Whitehall civil servants turned up at the office. As the mercury soared into the high 80s in old money, the pub gardens and parks were packed with people ‘working from home’.
On beaches around the country, sun-bathers were cheek by jowl, not a laptop in sight. The heatwave coincided with the news that 5.5 million people are now claiming out of work benefits, half of them on disability payments. I was in Central London and the whole city was alfresco, in shorts and flip-flops. They can’t all have been suffering from mental health issues — although judging by their dress sense quite a few of them might be.
BRIGHTON: Sun-seekers rushed to the beach on Thursday, retreating from packed sweaty cities amid the searing 32C heat that scorched the country
The fact is the Covid furlough, which went on far too long, and the cult of WFH institutionalised idleness, especially in the public sector. People got used to money for nothing and their chips for free.
Doing stuff-all is now looked on as an entitlement. And the politicians are too timid to pull the plug on unjustified state handouts. It might just be me, but there’s a Last Days of Rome vibe abroad right now. It’s not going to end well.
A bendy bus used to ferry passengers from Luton Airport to the railway station has turned up in Ukraine, where it is transporting troops from the front line for rest and recuperation.
This isn’t the first time an airport bus has found its way across the Channel.
Years ago, when I played football for the Surrey Herald we had an annual European tour. One year, we were headed for Vannes, in Brittany.
Go-Ahead confirmed its fleet of purple bendy buses had been donated to SHAP on August 21
Our assistant manager, Willie, said he’d organise a coach. As we waited outside the pub in Walton-on-Thames, up trundled an airport shuttle bus.
We’d forgotten Willie worked at Heathrow. Most of us spent the journey standing up, strap-hanging, as we crawled through France at a speed-restricted 30mph.
Let’s hope the brave Ukrainians have a more comfortable experience. As the lovely Lorraine Chase might have replied in those old Campari ads: Were you truly wafted here from Donetsk?
Nah, Luton Airport!
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