UK to Slash ‘Net Zero’ Spending to Boost Defence: Report
While the British government has long talked a big game on defence its actual spending priorities have always been elsewhere. But now, it is claimed the Westminster-favourite of cash for Net Zero may face the chop to pay for arms.
A demand from the UK Treasury on government departments to make cuts to their budgets to help overcome the defence spending ‘black hole’ will also fall on what is now called the ‘Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’, which has been asked to find more than £2 billion ($2.6bn) in savings. According to a report by British newspaper of the left The Guardian, a considerable share of this will come from the department’s £2.7 billion-a-year budget ($3.5bn) for subsidising the installation of green policy pet project heat pumps into domestic homes.
Originally cooked up as a government intervention to deliver ‘Net Zero’ goals by using taxpayer’s money to subsidise a transition away from boilers burning natural gas to heat homes to electric pumps, the scheme is said to have fallen out of favour in Whitehall because of the 80,000 installations it has so far partially paid for, the majority are to what the government considers higher-earning households.
This is because the scheme pays out between £7,000 and £9,500 ($9-12k) per household, only around half of the price of a heat pump install, so uptake has been greatest among those with nearly £10,000 in ready funds available within a family to invest in installing a heat pump. Even so, the government’s apparent definition of more affluent households betrays its exceedingly low ambitions, with that cut-off reported by the Guardian to be a household income of just £52,000 ($68k).
The £2 billion cut is reported to have been agreed under the previous government of Sir Keir Starmer and carried forward.
Heat pumps, despite the considerable expense of installation and retrofitting homes for them, questionable value-for-money, and sound pollution for near-neighbours, are — technologically, at least — essentially a sound idea. Rather than using electricity from the national grid to power a heater to warm a home, they use electricity to run a compressor, which harvests small amounts of heat energy from the our door air, to heat water indoors.
Because of the electric-driven compressor, it is able to harvest heat from outdoors even when the ambient temperature is lower than the inside of the home. They are considered, by the government, to be better for the environment because it means homes are consuming electricity to power a heat pump, rather than consuming natural gas to heat water.
Yet the change doesn’t realistically make heating a house much cheaper, given consumers still have to pay for both half the installation cost and the electricity itself, which due to decades of government energy policy mis-management leaving the nation vulnerable to global energy price shocks, is more expensive to consumers in the UK than in practically any other country on earth.
And in Britain — at least for now — much domestic electricity is produced by burning natural gas, and over five per cent of electricity is lost in transmission from power station to home.
The alleged plan to take money out of the government’s beloved Net Zero drive to hand to the military represents a massive policy shift in Westminster, which has for a very long time indulged in persistent belligerent rhetoric, warning of a coming age of instability and conflict, while simultaneously cutting the armed forces to the bone. If the British government does indeed start to fund the military, it would be one of the very first signs in many years that London does indeed perceive threats to the United Kingdom from outside its borders to be rising.
On this constant drumbeat of rhetoric in the absence of funding to the point where some branches of the armed forces are beginning to show concerning defects, Breitbart News has previously reported:
Talk of imminent war stalks the discourse in the United Kingdom… Both NATO and Westminster have spent the past two years drumming the idea into the British public that the post-Cold War era is over and the West is now in a 1930s-like pre-war state, if not already in the prelude of ‘Hybrid war’. The leitmotif of these warnings is the coming conflict, be it successfully deterred or not, will be a “whole of society event” and young Britons will be a particularly important part of that. … the head of the UK Armed Forces Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton made similar remarks. He added: “Sons and daughters, colleagues, veterans, will all have a role to play. To build, to serve and, if necessary, to fight. And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means”. The same day, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 said it would now be acting like the Second World War SOE agency, which launched sabotage campaigns against enemies in Europe. The Director said: “At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts… We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way.”
Comments